There's something I like to call the summertime simmer. You may have already heard of the "summertime slowdown" in business and in life, but in recent years it's become more and more apparent that business and even news cycles are never going to really take a holiday.
This week the news was an exciting conglomeration of breaking news, competitive midsummer Black Friday-esque sales, and yes, you guessed it, the announcement of yet another potential candidate in our ever-growing field of presidential dreams here in the U.S.
Sit back, sip on an ice-cold Arnold Palmer, and drink in this delicious data-driven news.
US Women's soccer team: victorious and parading it
As the USWNT stroll down the Canyon of Heroes after their hard-fought World Cup victory, all we can do is cheer them on, whether it be in person or online. The designated #USWNTparade hashtag has already been used over 50K times, and that number continues to grow as we show our support.
You can see major topics within the parade's conversation in the cloud below.
The parade conversation is being dominated by women at 61%, which is a contrast to the all-around Women's World Cup conversation which was led by men.
Jailbird flew the coop
When the world's most wanted cartel escapes a maximum security prison, people are going to talk, and talk they did to the tune of around 305K online mentions.
When it was discovered that Joaquin Guzman Loera, aka "El Chapo", had escaped prison everyone knew there would be headlines, but the manner in which he escaped and the accompanying video added fuel to the already buzzing online conversation.
The topic cloud below illustrates how enthralled people were with the mile-long tunnel El Chapo used to escape captivity.
You may also notice the mention of Donald Trump as he couldn't help but weigh-in on the conversation. He even claimed one of the conversation's top hashtags.
What a great segue way...
#TrumpYourCat: These are a few of the Internet's favorite things
Cats and The Donald separately are two of the internet's favorite muses, but when you combine the two: pure gold. The #TrumpYourCat craze features people giving their beloved feline friends Trump hair.
The conversation stands strong at around 7,300 mentions with new images of comb over-cats still being shared on channels like Twitter and Instagram. The top hashtags perfectly capture the nature of the discussion as #LOL rounds-out the top 10.
There is nothing wrong with some light-hearted poking, especially when your Twitter handle gets over 28 million impressions.
One Direction's father-to-be
If you listened very carefully on Tuesday evening you could hear an audible shriek as millions of One Direction fans reacted to the news that Louis Tomlinson is expecting his first child.
That shriek ultimately spilled onto the internet where Tomlinson's news collected around 135K mentions. Emotions were running high, and various, but the overall sentiment was negative with four times more negative categorized tweets then positive.
The conversation was overwhelmingly driven by women as they hold a 78% share of the unique Twitter authorship.
Major topics broken down across gender can be seen in the graph below, where Harry Styles finds many mentions within his band-mate's news.
That sweater, tho
When you have stellar news about how your company is making money and increasing subscribers hand-over-fist, there is only one thing to wear, and that's a novelty sweater.
Netflix CEO Reed Hastings graced the internet with his BoJack Horseman sweater as he delivered Netflix's earnings. The sweater garnered over 1,000 online mentions with men driving the Twitter conversation holding 74% of all unique, sweater tweets.
The sweater was very well received as 96% of all sentiment categorized tweets are positive.
One thing is certain, BoJack Horseman is happy about the sweater as the show's handle appears in the top 10 most mentioned tweeters and has accumulated over 89,000 impressions.
Amazon Prime Day: bigger isn't always better
The Amazon Prime Day conversation has accumulated over 404,000 online mentions.
Within the overall conversation Brandwatch has categorized more than 90,000 online mentions as showing positive or negative sentiment. Of the sentiment categorized data, around 47% is negative. That 47% encompasses more than 42,000 online mentions.
Having such an even sentiment distribution around an event is quite uncommon. Most data sets have a large majority of positive sentiment, not this conversation.
The below graph further illustrates the split of sentiment within the Prime Day conversation (these volumes represent only the online mentions that Brandwatch technology categorized as either positive or negative). You can clearly see that negative sentiment found its place on the day of the sale.
Amazon competitors that attempted to steal shoppers with sales of their own include Walmart, Target, Macy's and eBay, but their social conversations are quite small in comparison to Prime Day's.
Walmart garnered around 34,000 mentions in their own, specific data set while Best Buy, Target, eBay and Macy's each received about 2,100 (Best Buy), 1,400 (Target), 1,000 (eBay) and 325 (Macy's) respectively within the Prime Day data.
The top 10 most popular hashtags within the Prime Day conversation are below, and while #PrimeDay, #AmazonPrimeDay and #HappyPrimeDay round out the top three, the people-generated #PrimeDayFail accumulated more than 58 million impressions.
Using this same data, see full coverage of the story in articles in media outlets including TIME and Digiday..
Overpopulation, a tale of too many candidates
This week Scott Walker formally announced his intention to run for the Presidency. He is the Republican governor of Wisconsin, and his declaration brings the grand total of GoP candidates to: too many. In all honesty, you can't fault someone for wanting to undertake such a challenging position that garners a lot of criticism, but on the other hand when will the numbers stop? At 20? At 30?
It's hard to keep track of all that social conversation, so we've done it for you.
Let's take a look at the social conversation around each hopeful candidate over the past week.
Republican Candidates
On the Republican side of the social media ticket, Jeb Bush and Ted Cruz are holding down the forth with parallel volumes of Twitter mentions over the last week. With an average total of mentions that is almost neck and neck, the expected social spike when a new politician entered the race didn't make much of a dent in their steadfast hold on the minds and Tweets of the world.
Democratic Candidates
Social media isn't always 100 percent accurate when it comes to predicting the future, or even the current state of things. But I have to stop and wonder if the volume of conversation about the Democratic presidential hopefuls isn't indicative of who will pull forward when the time comes to seriously get down to business. When the final few pull through and get the backing of their party.
It seems so, based on the reality of the political climate of who will actually run and be a potential choice for America to decide when determining our next leader.
The Entire Field of Hopefuls
With Scott Walker's announcement to run for U.S. president, he overtook mentions of all candidates (that's right, all of them) on July 14. Not an easy feat with Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders staying in the social spotlight consistently.
Summertime data stew
The summer may be heating up, but the news isn't slowing down. We'll be tracking the top trending stories, intriguing events, and cool campaigns on social to bring you the data each week.
Interested in learning more about social listening and data or have a question for Brandwatch? Visit us here or email me [email protected]!