Covid-19 attention fatigue could be setting in

The news has been nothing but Covid-19 news for a while now. It’s good news for publishers – they’re seeing huge surges in traffic as people seek out updates and advice. But that might be about to change.

We used BuzzSumo to find out how many Covid-19-related articles have been published each day this month, and the number of social engagements and shares they got. With that data, we worked out the average engagement per article per day.

We then looked at how many people were talking about the virus daily. To track how they’ve changed in comparison to one another, we indexed them with their values for Mar 1 set at 100.

Published articles peaked last week, with March 18 seeing 137k of them alone. In comparison, the number of people discussing Covid-19 has dropped on average by 2.5% a day. Meanwhile, average engements have stayed fairly steady, but it looks like this may be falling too.

Is the constant barrage of news too much for people, causing them to lose interest?

We found 14k people talking about turning off the news or being fed up with it. This peaked on March 20 with 500 mentions. In comparison, 425 expressed the same sentiment the day of the Orlando nightclub shootings in the US.

There’s only so much gloomy news people can put up with. But at a time when fake news can easily spread and official advice is often updated, this is a worrying trend.

Going cashless? The US could struggle

Cash payments are being shunned in a bid to stop the spread of Covid-19 while money changes hands, but this could pose a particular problem for the US.

In a survey for our latest financial services report (conducted late February – early March 2020) we found that consumers in the United States are not keen at all on society going totally cashless.

Meanwhile, 44% of US respondents said they never use online/mobile banking. This could prove particularly tricky in times of self isolation and social distancing, when face-to-face interaction is less than ideal.

To keep people engaged in their personal finances while we’re in the grip of Covid-19, banks would do well to encourage their more hesitant customers to embrace online services. To do this, they must acknowledge the concerns people have around it.

One of the top reasons US respondents gave for not using mobile banking more often was a dislike of sharing information online or with apps. If banks can reassure their customers on online security, they may see a boost in online custom.

If going totally cashless/digital was an idea picking up pace before Covid-19, the virus could be supercharging society’s shift.

WFH data check-in

Working from home has suddenly become far more commonplace, and we wanted to take a look at how people were responding and behaving. We created a query with a bunch of WFH-related terms, including French, Spanish, German, and Italian translations.

We’re planning on including more languages and looking at different areas, but here are two things we pulled out today.

For most countries we looked at, people like and dislike WFH in pretty much equal measure, with one big exception: France. Nearly 40% of WFH mentions from the country were negative. They’re currently into their second week of a national lockdown.

Meanwhile, people are trying to figure out how to keep in touch with colleagues and loved ones. We tracked a range of big tech brands to see who was getting the most attention.

Zoom topped the list, and have seen a surge in users since the pandemic took hold. Communicating is clearly on people’s minds, with the rest of the list mainly made up of video call, messaging, and social media apps.

Finding your feet in a pandemic

It’s not news that the financial markets across the world are falling fast – in the States the market is falling quicker than the Lehman Brothers in 2008 – but not every industry is struggling.

Online home entertainment networks are doing well. People can’t stop asking for recommendations online (25.4k) with people mentioning the biggest streaming brands 447k times on social media.

Online interest in fashion, especially loungewear, has peaked too, with 17.8k English-langue mentions online. This seems to have been boosted by sales promotions, which were mentioned 505k times on social.

As we’ve already mentioned, internet platforms like Zoom, have become increasingly crucial as more people work from home. But it’s not all business: from virtual pubs, to concerts, to birthday parties and weddings, people are really being creative with what they can do to socialise.

There were 237K mentions of similar services, with 39% of emotion-categorized conversation registering as joyful, as people try to make the most of the quarantine.

People are really keen on live streamed gigs on social, with 117.2k mentions. K-pop was a particular favorite (that’s something we see a lot of at Brandwatch) with Golden Child (a K-pop boyband) reaching 2.7k mentions. That’s the same number of mentions as John Legend’s live stream!

There seems to be a huge opportunity for corporate partnerships to publicize themselves with these crowd-drawing events, as no brands emerge in the conversation.

There are hardly any brands popping up in this conversation, so there’s a big opportunity here for some corporate sponsorship. We’ve found previously that K-pop brand partnerships can create a huge amount of buzz, so now could be the time to get on board.

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Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team