What are Twitter Users Thankful for this November?

December 2, 2019

As the sun sets on another semester here at the University of Tennessee, the holiday season provides an opportunity for introspection and consideration of all the things bad and good. It is

Thanksgiving is celebrated in the United States during the last Thursday of the month and has a long, interesting history. But the purpose of Thanksgiving—to give thanks for the many blessings in our lives—is not confined to one culture or even one month. Thanksgiving takes many forms and can be seen in the daily lives of every day people. Sometimes our thankfulness is displaced by the troubles we face. This is understandable, but expressing thankfulness is something we can give to ourselves as well as to others. This perspective is well encapsulated by the writer William Arthur Ward who is quoted as sharing that “Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.” With this idea in mind and with the end of the semester quick upon us, staff at the Social Media Command Center take to Social Studio once more to see what people are saying about thankfulness on social media.

 

 

In order to get a sense of what people are thankful for, we will do a create a social listening summary in Social Studio using the topic profile of “Thankful” by directing the system to search for the word “thankful” in Twitter posts specifically. Thankfulness knows no language, but for the purposes of this search we will set our language target to English while keeping a global search set. A review of the 789,000 resulting tweets has several interesting findings.

 

Perhaps unsurprisingly, thankful is seen as having a positive sentiment according to Social Studio with a 91.4% positive sentiment. Several countries are represented in the tweets including the United States, the United Kingdom, Philippines, China, Brazil, and others. People are thankful for many things. Reading through the list of tweets, you see people thankful for the good things in their lives, thankful for jobs they love, thankful for President Trump, thankful for impeachment hearings, and thankful for foods such as pizza. So the conversations are varied and probably comparable to the things you’ll be discussing around your own thanksgiving table this year!

 

So before you go to end your semester and be thankful for the good things in your own life, consider how Social Studio may be of use to you in the new year. Perhaps there is a hidden research project waiting among the many “Thankful” tweets. Maybe you’ll want to see how Santa Claus is being tracked via social media as he makes his way around the world. Or perhaps you’ll make a new year’s resolution to come visit the Center and get started in Social Studio. No matter your holiday or research plans, the staff at the Social Media Command Center are thankful for you, wishes you a happy holiday season, and looks forward to serving you in the new year.