Presidential hopefuls are a joke - literally. The nation socially celebrated Women's Equality and the majesty of the canine species. The economy toyed with our emotions.
Let's took a look at the news this week in social data insights. Time to share the social intelligence!
The Most Important Presidential Election Update To Date
We have provided broad insights into the 2016 Presidential Election every week that a new contender has entered the ring, and with so many hopefuls, there have been plenty of updates. However, perhaps the most important revelation took place at the end of last week.
In a couple of major polls, Deez Nuts held a strong third position, and the nation collectively laughed. Between gasps of laughter, people fumbled their way onto the internet and mentioned the new, surprise candidate over 195K times.
It soon came to light that the mystery candidate was a 15-year-old Iowan, and the joke made complete sense. The discovery of the origin of the peculiar candidate found its way into the top topics of the discussion of course.
In the spirit of the continued trolling of the 2016 election, online support for the candidate spawned six hashtags that garnered hundreds-of-millions impressions, collectively.
This may be a master-level lesson in viral marketing: If you want your message to takeoff, think like a 15 year old socially-savvy kid.
Monday's Are Rough and The Stock Market Can Relate
Many Americans got into work and were greeted by the hashtag #BlackMonday. This was not in response to some fantastic, money-saving deals, but rather a downturn of global markets. The hashtag was used nearly 128K times.
This was a huge conversation that settled down as the week progressed.
The majority of contributors to this discussion were men accounting for 68% of this topics' unique tweets.
While the United States led this conversation in contribution at 63%, the below map clearly illustrates how this conversation engulfed the whole world.
It will be interesting to track this conversation as markets dip and climb each day.
#NationalDogDay Should Seriously Become a National Holiday
This section could be simply summed up by saying, "People f#@&ing love dogs." This is overtly apparent on the internet as a whole, but on #NationalDogDay people tend to gush a bit more.
The hashtag was used around 818K times, as people declared their love for their favorite four-legged friends.
Women dominated the conversation with 62% of unique tweets.
And while #NationalDogDay was only supposed to be a single day, the social conversation spilled over to encompass two.
It would appear that one day isn't enough for man's best friend/the internet's favorite muse. Every day is national dog day in this nation of dog lover's. Even the coldest of hearts will melt upon viewing this heartwarming puppy video (spoiler alert: there's also a baby in it).
Another Everyday Holiday: #WomensEqualityDay
This week also played host to Women's Equality Day. This marked another massive conversation as the hashtag, #WomensEqualityDay, garnered more than 222K mentions online.
This discussion was largely driven by women who held 75% of unique Twitter authorship. You can see the topics that resonated most among women in the cloud below. You can see "19 amendment" and "95 years" within the cloud, as this year marked the 95th anniversary of women's suffrage.
Additional major topics focused on current equality issues like the gender wage gap and paid leave, as you can see below.
The sheer size of this conversation demanded attention, and portrayed the issues that still need to be addressed and resolved.
Twitter Cries Out for the McWhopper, Is Met with a Resounding 'No'
Until yesterday, the McWhopper was only an Epic Meal Time fever-dream, but as Burger King attempted to recruit McDonalds in a World Peace Day alliance to make those dreams come true, dreamers took to Twitter.
The McWhopper has garnered nearly 49K mentions on Twitter. The conversation was largely positive as Brandwatch sentiment-categorized tweets were 3.7-times more positive within the McWhopper discussion than negative.
The majority of positive tweets expressed the excitement of the possibility of a McWhopper, while most negative tweets are reactions from people who heard that their dream burger will remain a figment of their imagination.
The top, naturally occurring hashtags within the conversation firmly show where the public stands as #SettleTheBeef accrued nearly 13 million impressions.
Even though our hopes appear to be dashed for now, the very proposal has people excited about the possibility of a McWhopper in the future.
Until the day an actual McWhopper exists, we'll just have to keep going to both chains and combining their famous burgers ourselves - shamelessly.
Summer of Data Settles Down
The sun may be slowly setting on summer 2015, but data stories are just heating up. This Sunday we'll be looking at MTV's VMAs social conversations, and we've got a lot in store for September including EMMYs data, new tech product launches (cough cough, looking at you mobile world) and more.
Interested in learning more about social listening and data or have a question for Brandwatch? Visit us here or email me [email protected]!