Unique, Huge, and Growing

Author: Zack Condry

Reposted from https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/unique-huge-growing-zack-condry/

The title sounds like a three-word definition of the Coronavirus. It’s actually the best way to describe Twitter conversation about Coronavirus.

Unique

92% of total Coronavirus tweets are unique (I’ve added to the search keywords since my initial post yesterday). This is atypical for an event-driven conversation on Twitter. Typically, you’ll see news publications or issue influencers driving the conversation and the unique tweets hover around ~50%. We believe it’s because information on the Coronavirus is a moving target.

Twitter conversation on the topic is fluid, nuanced, global, and has many different offshoots. Topic offshoots include mandated closing of public places, homeschool woes, macabre memes, lies or misinformation, etc. While these offshoots take Twitter users down a different posting path, it’s all part of one giant amoeba of conversation.

Huge (or is it Yuge?)

Do you see that blue spike? That’s the conversation about the most recent Super Bowl.

The orange mountain that comes after it? That’s the conversation on the Coronavirus.

In fact, we added “football” and “NFL” to the search query and still couldn’t get anywhere close to the level of conversation we’re seeing with Coronavirus.

In the past 90 days, the NFL + Football + Super Bowl Twitter conversation was only 30% of all virus-related discussion. If we add in mentions of the Oscars and Best Picture winner “Parasite,” it only reaches 39.7% of all virus chatter on Twitter.

While Coronavirus is currently not the biggest thing to ever happen on Twitter (that title belongs to the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election), it is very clearly one of the biggest events to ever happen in the history of social media.

Growing

During the past month, Coronavirus conversation has grown 641% and projects to maintain or surpass the current level of discussion.

At these current levels – roughly 2.8M tweets a day – we’re seeing a dip in conversation when the majority of the Western Hemisphere is asleep, but Twitter chatter never gets below 43,000 tweets per hour. 

Eventually, Twitter users will grow tired of this topic. Still, given the amount of daily news and environmental changes on the issue, we’ll continue to see significant discussion for many months to come.  

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