Photo by Anthony DELANOIX on Unsplash

Dover, Delaware is many things. Home of Delaware’s capital. Home of one of the country’s top HBCUs. Home of the Monster Mile. Once a year, though, Dover transforms from its semi-suburban glory into the Woodlands.

For 3 days each year, Dover welcomes the Firefly Festival and thousands of people with it. At CompassRed, we love how many people come and celebrate in our home state with us. In honor of that, we took a look at the Twitter timelines of 15 of the top music festivals in the world for 2019¹ — including our very own Firefly.

We’ll try to answer a few different questions about these music festivals based off of what each of them tweets:

What words and phrases are used most frequently across all festivals? What words and phrases are used most frequently by individual festivals? What is unique about each festival?

Before anything else, though, a great place to start to understand the festivals is with the number of followers² that they have on Twitter:

There seems to be a pretty large disparity in the number of followers that each Festival has. Ultra Music Festival dwarfs everything else and then there is a long tail following it. Firefly has the 6th most followers on this list, grouped relatively closely with Rolling Loud and Hangout Music Festival.

Some of these festivals tweet a lot — much more than what you would expect given their follower counts.

We can see that in an even more pronounced way by directly comparing the number of tweets made by each festival to its followers:

Ultra Music Festival and Rolling Loud jump out for very different reasons. Generally, there is a group of music festivals that are relatively closely grouped together with several outliers beyond those.

More interesting than the number of tweets or the number of followers, though, is the actual content of what each music festival tweets. First, we start at a high level and look at words that are used most frequently by all accounts in aggregate³.