9ice vs Flavour: The Twitter Analysis

5 min readAug 11, 2021

All it needed was a Twitter poll and a response quoting the poll, and boom, a conversation began on Twitter last week which spiralled into over 20,000 tweets within 7 days. While this may not look like the everyday trends topic, there is quite a lot to take from the conversations surrounding who the “greatest’ music artiste is between Flavour; the multi-talented highlife crooner and, 9ice, the Gongo Aso crooner, a song many claimed to be an anthem in the country.

In trying to find out the genesis of the whole conversation, I set out to discover the users who drove the conversation and measure the spread across various networks across Twitter’s landscape in the country.

GENESIS

It was late last Tuesday night when the user (@77_Kiah) posted a poll on Twitter asking whether 9ice or Flavour was considered to be a legend in the Nigerian music industry.

Perhaps, it was how the question was asked that fueled the varying degrees of responses. In the user’s words, he already classified 9ice as a legend and was probably trying to elicit responses to the poll to prove his assertion.

But, it wasn’t the poll per se that drove conversations to the sky heavens, it was a quoted reply that gave room for the debate to get fiery responses. A user @_PLICE gave his personal opinion in support of Flavour in a manner as is common on the bird’s app. Little did he know he would be the instigator of a flurry of tweets which he would wake up to.

This ‘who is a legend between the two superstars’ conversation will go on to engulf the Nigerian Twitter space for the next 5 days. Unprecedented.

EXODUS

1 At 12: 10 am, Less than an hour later after the Poll by @77_Kiah, @_PLICE dropped his opinion by quoting the top originator of the conversation.

His tweet read: “Lol. Flavour is bigger than 9ice in every musical aspect.”

After this tweet, it looked like the tweet was going to be another passing-by tweet. At least, the analysis showed that there was little engagement, then…

2At 11 AM, the conversation begins to spread. Here, users @_PLICE and @ItzBasito had the highest engagements coupled with other original opinions from others.

3 Here at 3 PM, we see the highest retweets of the following users @Mbahdeyforyou @itzbasito

After the popular Twitter influencer @Mbahdeyforyou made this comment, his tweet tipped the entire conversation.

Here’s how the conversation evolved days after (see the graph below):

NUMBERS

How The Tweets Were Collected:

Tweets were collected using the keywords “9ice” & “Flavour”.

Here’s the opportunity to educate everyone that the artist popularly referred to as Flavour N’abania is correctly spelled as “Flavour” with a “u” instead of “Flavor”.

A total of 25,000 tweets were collected within a span of 7 days.

The total number of unique handles involved in the conversation — 11,313

ENGAGEMENT

Top Retweets

Highest Replies

The bar chart below shows the users with the highest number of replies in the conversation.

SENTIMENT ANALYSIS

For sentiment analysis, I employed Workbench which uses the VADER Sentiment Analysis.

VADER (Valence Aware Dictionary and sEntiment Reasoner) is a lexicon and rule-based sentiment analysis tool that is specifically attuned to sentiments expressed in social media.

Tweets were classified according to their sentiments on a scale of -1 (Very Negative) to 1 (Very Positive).

Here is the outcome of the sentiment analysis:

Network Analysis

With the Network distribution, we were able to discover the top accounts by the degree in the network.

Modularity reports showed there were over 400 communities and 7 were the most active. From the Modularity report, we were able to deduce that the contributions to the conversation weren’t restricted to just a few communities and handles as it involved inputs from a wide range of communities on the social network.

Here we see the accounts that have the highest number of degrees in terms of engagement within the conversation.

TRIBALISM

There were lots of concerns that the legendary status debate would take a tribalistic turn and according to the data, the mentions of tribal words (“Tribalism”, “Igbo”, “Yoruba”) were significant (15%). This tests a theory that an argument can’t go too long without tribal undertones on TwitterNG.

Mentions of different tribes and the variations of “Tribe”

RESPONSE BY THE CELEBRITIES INVOLVED

Flavour with username @2niteFlavour posted a photo of himself working out and captioned it “No Days Off..”. He later went ahead the next minute to post a photo promoting his upcoming tour. You can call that taking up an opportunity that presents itself on a platter. Sure he would have gotten several people’s attention.

For 9ice, there wasn’t any activity on his alleged Twitter handle @9iceofficial (unverified) but an artist used the buzz to promote his song featuring 9ice with a hashtag campaign