Sentiment analysis revealed the conversation around last week’s inauguration was largely positive.

It’s also continued to spark chatter on social media since the day itself, and the memes are still coming. So what’s driving all this post-inauguration conversation?

The poet who captured the hearts of social

Amanda Gorman, the 22-year-old National Youth Poet Laureate, pinched the show with her poem ‘The Hill We Climb’. Impressively, there were 325k mentions of the poem on social media on the day.

People celebrated it for being brave (32k mentions), an inspiration (24k mentions), and powerful (13k mentions), and when we looked at emotion-categorized mentions on social media we found that 92% were classed as joyful.

Part of this joy was driven by Gorman’s announcement that her recently announced books had made it to the top of the Amazon charts within hours of her inauguration appearance.

Breakthroughs in fashion

This year’s outfits didn’t just set the tone for the inauguration, they made lesser-known luxury brands household names.

We found that several outfits being mentioned a lot on social media also saw increased search interest online and, crucially, that household high fashion brand mentions were in the shadows of their lesser-known counterparts.

We found 8k mentions of Ralph Lauren, and 2k mentions each of Chanel and Prada. Meanwhile mentions of lesser known designers, like Sergio Hudson (5k mentions), Christopher John Rodgers (4k mentions) and Schiaparelli (3k mentions) outnumbered mentions of the bigger players, and generated more searches.

Perhaps the most notable brand outnumbering mentions of legacy high fashion brands was Miu Miu (owned by Prada) which clocked in 13k mentions last week, after Ella Emhoff (Harris’ step-daughter) graced the stage wearing a jacket from the label.

When we looked at mentions of Miu Miu together with Google Trends search interest data indexed against January 17 2020, we can see that the exposure during the inauguration translated to record highs in social conversation and search interest.

Thanks to the inauguration, a wealth of people who may have been previously unaware of the brand were suddenly interested in getting to know it better.

Meals for memes

We couldn’t give you an inauguration conversation special without touching on the now infamous image of Bernie Sanders in his mittens.

Vermont senator Bernie Sanders captured the hearts (and imaginations) of social media on Wednesday, after he was pictured wrapped up warm against the bitter January elements. The image was shared widely and sparked something of a Photoshop war.

There were 4m mentions of the Bernie Sanders meme on social media between January 18 and January 24 2021, and that’s not counting instances where people shared the image without mentioning Sanders. That’s the power of an image in 2021.

Many on social media hoped to scoop up Bernie’s mittens (313k mentions) or jacket (32k mentions) or the sweatshirt that Sanders’ created to sell for Meals on Wheels Vermont (139k mentions) for themselves. But lots of fans were disappointed to learn they had already sold out.

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch React Team