React: Is Kanye a Hufflepuff? This Week’s Social Round-Up

Is it Friday already? Time to look at what shook up social this week.

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The greatest Twitter feud of all time

We’ve all done it.

Misunderstood a harmless comment and launched into a merciless tirade that insults almost every aspect of the victim’s character and relationships, only to realize the mistake, apologize and erase the conversation if nothing was said.

OK maybe we haven’t all done it, but it was the unfortunate fate of Kanye West on Wednesday after Wiz Khalifa commented on his new album title “Waves” on Twitter.

Kanye’s response, which has been turned into an ingeniously hilarious Shakespearean soliloquy, was a just a little over the top.  

At its peak the feud returned nearly 14,000 mentions in an hour and maintained a big presence on social throughout the day.

Kanye definitely got people’s attention with his outburst, and opinion was divided between amusement and shock at his comments on the day.

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Facebook’s makin’ changes

Facebook has been in the news a lot this week, not least because it just posted over $1bn in quarterly profit.

But that’s not what rattled most people’s cages. In fact, the big news this week was that soon we’ll be able to use the emoji-reactions Zuckerberg announced back in October.

While a simple ‘like’ will stay, emotions ‘love’, ‘haha,’ ‘wow’, ‘sad’, ‘angry’ and ‘yay’ will also be joining the options for responding to a post.

Responses have been mixed and many are tentative but sadly there isn’t an emoji for that announced yet.

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Big tunes hit social

It was a big week for music on social as releases from both Rihanna and Zayn Malik trended on Twitter throughout the week.

Rihanna’s #Work (featuring Drake) trended on Wednesday, returning hundreds of mentions a limit as the song rose up the charts to number 1 on iTunes.

#Work: Rihanna’s new single is getting thousands of tweets per hour and climbing the charts: pic.twitter.com/i5nYxrGBps

— Brandwatch React (@BW_React) January 27, 2016

Meanwhile, Zayn Malik’s first solo single was released today (Friday 29th) and almost instantly trended on Twitter.

We found over 40,000 mentions of #PillowTalk on Friday morning (GMT) alone and the single is battling with Work for number one on iTunes.

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Trump dominates debate without turning up

The 7th GOP debate on Thursday night attracted the usual (enormous) amount of attention on social.

Surprisingly Trump’s boycott of the debate still left him as the most mentioned candidate on the day on social.

Despite his absence he was still mentioned in the debate itself ten times in the first eight minutes.

Instead of the debate Trump attended a fundraiser event for veterans:

An unbelievable night in Iowa with our great Veterans! We raised $6,000,000.00 while the politicians talked! #GOPDebate

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 29, 2016

Check out our summary of Thursday’s debate here.

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And finally

Harry Potter fans got excited this week when the newly designed sorting hat quiz returned to Pottermore.

Mentions surged on Thursday and Friday as “Potterheads” tried out the quiz and posted their thoughts and assigned houses online.

Pottermore – Home #omg the #SortingHat is back thank you @pottermorehttps://t.co/bPP3PoLGUX

— carolyn (@caroLynSehgal) January 29, 2016

Meanwhile, some decided to take sorting into their own hands:

Ted Cruz is a Slytherin. Marco Rubio is a Hufflepuff. Rand Paul is an unpopular Ravenclaw. Chris Christie is a Dursley. #GOPDebate

— Alyssa Rosenberg (@AlyssaRosenberg) January 29, 2016

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