Social media is one of the best agents of expressing emotions today, and that's why social media monitoring companies are most likely preparing for the upcoming Valentine's Day. Now that this long-awaited event is just around the corner, a lot of people around the world might actually have plans on greeting their loved ones, sharing their thoughts or giving out pieces of love advice through the use of social media sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Google Plus, and Instagram and so on. On the other hand, some people might actually share their negative thoughts about it as well. These activities can trigger, again, a huge increase in the amount of posts that users normally share via these sites.
Radian6, a provider of the social media monitoring platform for marketing, communications and customer support professionals, was able to create an edifying infographic that shows a breakdown and summary of social media conversations during last year's Valentine's Day. They concluded that there were 8,293,748 mentions across the major social networking sites about the special day. Also, Mashable was able to share to its readers three significant analyses (Sentiment, Topic and Share of Voice Analysis) from NM Incite regarding people's Twitter activities during Valentine's Day which were broke down into female and male categories. These analyses showed that the males were more peeved about cupid than the females. However, females covered up 66% according to share of voice.
Clearly, there are already some mentions of Valentine's Day during the first few days of February, because people consider it as the "Love" month. Some people welcome the month gladly and others, sadly. Those previous studies and statistics, together with these current activities, can actually be one of the best bases for social media monitoring companies to see whether the sentiments will go up, down or steady. In addition to that, companies that have related services and products can also gain a huge benefit from these studies. They can either carry out an early social media assessment to help them plan for their marketing strategies for the exact day.
The question of social media being ready for this event goes to whether the authoritative sites can handle a huge amount of posts in one day. Those posts may include statuses, updates, photos and even videos. That's a one good reason to say that the sites that will be most affected won't probably be just Twitter and Facebook; Instagram, Pinterest and YouTube, too. Instagram, being one of the most used and popular photo sharing application, might actually have a massive amount of photo uploads. A lot of pins may be pinned on Pinterest as well. The same goes with YouTube, since people might actually upload their "video messages" online and share it to their loved (or probably, hated) ones.
There will be an extreme number of posts regarding Valentine's Day, so the question of being ready should also set off to a lot of people out there who mostly take social media as a part of their daily lives already.