Coronavirus on Social Media: A Social Listening Analysis [Infographic]

Julia Miashkova — April 16, 2020

Coronavirus is the buzzword of 2020. Like it or not, COVID-19 stirred the pot unlike anything most of us ever witnessed, cankering our minds, DMs, and social media feeds. While some people are dealing with the imminent implications coronavirus has brought onto their lives, others are looking at the data and contemplating the world we’ll be left with. Both groups end up with more questions than answers.

Powered by the mighty social listening technology, we decided to look for the answers on social media — the world’s largest database of demographic insights. We wanted to know:

• how big the coronavirus talk really was,
• what key topics were discussed in the context of COVID-19,
• how people were dealing with the new reality of remote work and quarantine,
• which items were reported out of stock because of panic buying.

To dig up all of these insights, I used Awario to set up mentions monitoring and collect every piece of coronavirus data there was on social media and the web. Over a month later, this is what I found out.

As you can see, the volume of conversations around coronavirus and their total reach speak for themselves. There were 23.6 million mentions of COVID-19 in 5 weeks, generating 3.9 trillion impressions. This means that an average Internet user, of which there are over 4.5 billion, has been exposed to mentions of COVID-19 some 866 times over the past 5 weeks.

Meanwhile, the Topic cloud — the storage of the most popular keywords used alongside coronavirus — uncovered people’s biggest concerns. Interestingly, Trump was the only name that made it to the list of most used terms.

Remote work and quarantine

We then looked closer at the mentions of the two biggest phenomena brought onto the world by the pandemic: working from home and quarantine. Namely, we started monitoring mentions of keywords like remote work, home office, self-isolation, social distancing, etc. What we did next is looked at the mentions’ sentiment to see how people were feeling about each aspect and then sorted out top-5 things liked and disliked the most.

Family, as it turns out, can be both a deal-maker and deal-breaker when it comes to remote work and self-isolation. With family time leading in all of our charts, it’s safe to say that what brings us most joy also gets on our nerves the fastest.

Meanwhile, spending time outdoors was only featured once among the things people liked the most during lockdown. Hoping these were solitary walks and cozy times in one’s own backyard, we’re moving to the third and last phenomenon examined with social listening.

Panic buying

The final part of our research was dedicated to panic buying. Here, we set up mentions monitoring for phrases such as out of stock and sold out to determine which items were reported missing from supermarket shelves most often. Here’s what we found out.Quarantined markets are tough. Panicky markets are even tougher. While manufacturers are taking notes and expanding production to meet the increased demand, we hope you manage to weather the storm with all essential items in stock.

Before you go

Clearly, coronavirus is something we won’t be able to shake off for a while. While the world is dealing with the new, ever-changing reality, we at Awario will keep monitoring all conversations around coronavirus found on social media and the web. For real-time updates and live social listening feeds, please visit Awario’s COVID-19 Resources.

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