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Published March 24th 2016

React: Ten Things That Tweeters Claim They Can’t Live Without

Brandwatch analyzes tweets explaining what people can't live without

While lots of people shy away from sharing too much of their personal life on Twitter, many use it to project their innermost fears, hopes and desires.

Some even broadcast the details of their dreams and their dating lives publicly, often to the amusement of everyone else.

Twitter is also a place where people talk about what they hold most dear, so we decided to look at data over two months to determine what Twitter “can’t (or couldn’t) live without”.

The aim was to remove the spam (“10 beauty products you can’t live without”, for example) and identify patterns in what people were talking about.

From the 1st of January to the end of February we found 16,000 unfiltered mentions of people talking about things they couldn’t survive without, excluding retweets.

Here are ten things we found large groups of tweeters declaring their need for.

10. Netflix

We thought we’d find Netflix and we were right. Round 150 people purported not to be able to live without the streaming service.

It’s even turned into a pick up line:

9. Music

If you can’t leave your house without earphones in you’ll empathize with these hundreds of tweeters. Music is definitely an essential part of life to a lot of people, and plenty have taken to Twitter to express their need for it.

8. Phones

It’s no secret that living without a phone is hard, and over 400 tweeters are happy to admit they couldn’t live without theirs. iPhones made up around a quarter of these tweets.

Some tweeters even write poetic messages to their phones:

7. The people (and animals) closest

While many connections are made online, family and pets were a lot more popular subjects of “can’t live without” tweets than internet related topics like Netflix or social media.

Well, mostly.

We found over 500 mentions of family and pets, plus nearly 200 mentions of friends. How sweet.

6. Junk food

We found a whole lot of junk food tweets and decided to group them by searching for popular food types.

Fries, burgers, pancakes and hot dogs made up our initial search and we found a plenty of brand names within them, from McDonald’s to Bob’s Burgers.

Here’s a break down of some of the food types we found tweeters declaring their love for:

JUNK FOOD CANT LIVE WITHOUT

On the subject of food, we definitely appreciated this bread-loving tweet:

5. Meat/cheese

We separated meat and cheese from junk food because of a common pattern we spotted.

Though many were talking about not being able to live without either or both, many were using them as reasons why they or someone they knew couldn’t become a vegan or vegetarian.

Leaving the vegan/vegetarian mentions aside, there were around 90 mentions of cheese and 150 mentions of meat amid the “I can’t live without” tweets.

4. Social media

Who knew tweeters loved social media so much? We recently wrote about people talking about being addicted to social media, and these guys might fall into that category.

We found hundreds of mentions from people not being able to live without all sorts of different social media, though for some tweeters it might not be the network that’s important but the subject.

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3. Coffee

We definitely weren’t surprised to find hundreds of mentions of coffee in our “can’t live without” dataset.

Dunkin’ Donuts was definitely feeling the love from this tweet:

2. Make-up

Avoiding the article spam (“10 beauty products you can’t live without” etc) by removing .com links, we found plenty of people talking about make-up and specific products that they love enough not to tweet about.

We found nearly 300 instances of people saying they can’t live without make-up, although we suspect there are far more.

1. You

Well, maybe we deserved to witness this sickening outpour of love since we searched for “can’t live without” during the Valentine’s period. We certainly weren’t expecting to find over 1,000 mentions of “Can’t/couldn’t live without you”, though.

Twitter is all loved up whether they’re directing their tweets at another account or at a mysterious someone who’s not aware of the tweeter’s feelings.

Since the melancholic tweets are heartfelt and sometimes tragic, but also a bit hilarious, we thought it’d be a bit mean to post them here. Instead, here are some people who’s “you” in question wasn’t human.

What can’t you live without? Let us know @BW_React

 

Gemma Joyce

Head of Content
Categories
Topic Analysis
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