Yesterday was July 4th, a time when most people try to do all of their classic summer activities in one long weekend. I went into the weekend wondering, “How I could determine what was the most popular activity for Americans celebrating July 4th around the country?” I decided that in order to answer this question, I should treat all of these activities the same way that our customers do when they are trying to determine where their brand or product fits into the marketplace. Listen to social media and let the world’s largest focus group answer the question for them.
There are two major things that every brand must look at when they are trying to see where they fit into their market space: Share of Voice and brand sentiment. I decided to look at Share of Voice first for July 4th activities.
In what should be no surprise, fireworks is the most discussed July 4th activities on social media, garnering almost 60% of all online mentions around activities to do on the July 4th holiday. What was really surprising to me was that the world famous Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest didn’t generate more online buzz, as it had less than 1% of mentions. I’m happy to say that I enjoyed the top two most popular activities on my July 4th weekend, as I saw two fireworks shows and took part in two BBQs (including making one myself).
The next thing that is important to know when you are trying to see how you fit into your market space, is to see how people are talking about your brand, in terms of the sentiment of the online buzz that your product created. That is best done through Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score, which gives your brand or product a score of 0-100 based on a combination of factors, including the volume of online mentions and the sentiment of those mentions. With that in mind, I wanted to look at which July 4th activities scored the highest since that is a great way to tell which activities people enjoyed the most.
While Fireworks were the most discussed July 4th topic, people seemingly were disappointed in the shows they saw this year as it ranked at the bottom of our SRS lists with a score of only 48.32. The most enjoyed activities over the July 4th weekend this year were watching America’s Past Time, Baseball (with an SRS of 63.02), going to the beach (SRS of 61.45) and enjoying a holiday BBQ (SRS of 60.85).
Even though I’ve discovered which July 4th activities were most popular and which ones were enjoyed the most over this past weekend, I still love looking at extra tidbits of social data. So to share that enjoyment, here are some extra bits of information that will let you know more about who was talking about their July 4th activities, and what they were saying.
Most mentions of July 4th activities came from women (54%) than men (46%) and were written in English (58.4%) followed by Spanish (16.5%). The most popular hashtags for the 2017 July 4th holiday weekend were: #4thOfJuly, #Fireworks and #FourthOfJuly.
However you spent your July 4th holiday, I hope that you had a great weekend! If you want to learn more about how to use Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score, you can download our guide on it here.
