Thankful 2.0: What Do Twitter Users Have to Say About It Amidst the Coronavirus
Around Thanksgiving, we performed an analysis of what people were thankful for as the holidays commenced. As we near the end of April, things couldn’t seem less like November. The trees are blooming, not losing their leaves. The temperature is rising, not beginning to descend. But also people are not (for the most part) gathering, but instead following health guidelines to stay at home and away from others in order to stop the spread of Covid-19, a virus that many of us could not have imagined having to be thankful for way back then!
As the semester begins winding down though under the strangest of circumstances, now it seemed like a good time to revisit the topic of thankfulness and to see what Twitter users have to say about it during this time of global pandemic. Apparently, a great deal.
Looking at the results of our “thankful” search in Social Studio, we can see that more than 600,000 people have tweeted about the topic in the past week. Some people are thankful for political leadership shown by presidents or other elected officials. Some are thankful to God for providing them with everything they need. Others still are thankful to artists and performers for doing their part in keeping people going and providing a sense of normalcy to many during these anything but normal times.
A quick review of the results show that there is not a great deal of mentions of thankfulness related to coronavirus responses. Therefore, some might view some of these results and think that there is not a great deal of related thankfulness going on. The reality is though that like most search mechanisms, Social Studio is especially sensitive to what you request. To get more tailored tweets, you might have to try several combinations of searches such as “thankful” AND “coronavirus” or “thanks” AND “COVID-19” in order to get more specific results. The reality too is that the algorithm of Social Studio can be manipulated in the sense that a word may come across as trending within a specific search…but if one tweet is being retweeted over and over again, it can skew the results you are seeing.
Nevertheless, many people are thankful right now for all the work that is going on to respond to the Coronavirus. Thanks is going out to first responders. To healthcare workers. To grocery clerks. To delivery workers and so many others. What are you thankful for? Tweet about it and maybe your results will come up in someone’s newsfeed who really needs the gratitude or even just the reminder that despite our ongoing troubles, there is still so much to be thankful. In the meantime, we at the Adam Brown Social Media Command Center will continue to follow results related to Coronavirus and other news. Take care, stay home, and keep safe!