Following on from our successful build of the #EURef Data Hub with Twitter UK and The Press Association, Blurrt were approached by Twitter UK to analyse and understand the conversation around the EU Referendum for a live ITV results broadcast on the 23rd June 2016.

ITV’s live show ran continuously through the evening, night and into next morning as results came in from around the country. Rob Owers, Head of News at Twitter UK, presented a series of Blurrt Live visuals and queued tweets from Blurrt Playlist to help provide viewers with a snapshot of how the wider public have been interacting with the EU Referendum on social media.

Rob showed how the volume of conversation around the #EURef had changed over the past month, detailing how the visible spikes in volume on the graphs correlated to live debates that had been previously shown on tv as well as identifying the opening and closing of polls.

Seemingly the whole of the UK were logging onto social media to share their opinion of what was happening with the results as Blurrt were collecting a staggering 5,400 tweets per minute, a figure that Rob shared on-air via our tweet counter.

One of the visuals built for the Data Hub that showed who’s the most talked about key figure was also discussed on the broadcast, leading to a discussion as to how this had changed recently, with Boris Johnson sliding down the table and David Cameron significantly in the lead.

We also used our Playlist tool to curate and display interesting images tweeted from voters earlier in the day as well as showing individual tweets from key influencers reacting in real-time to the results. This ability to provide curated, live and reactionary real-time insights and opinions on-air from social media is a perfect use example of why Playlist is such a useful feature within Blurrt!

Later in the evening, or should we say early morning as it was closing in to 4am, Rob also showed a visual on-screen of where in the world tweets were coming in from discussing the #EURef. This visual clearly showed the vote wasn’t just a hot topic of conversation in the UK, but all across the world with tweets pinging from every point possible across the map.

The nature of live television, combined with the added unexpected way in which results were going meant that there were many other interesting insights that Blurrt had prepared which sadly didn’t make the cut on the night.

But we’re still over the moon our insights and understanding were used live on ITV for such a significant event and plus, that just means we’ll save those extra visuals for the next time!