What Are We Waiting For?

Brandwatch Bulletin #53: What Are We Waiting For?

A look at what we can't wait to do.

26 April 2021

Today we’re taking a look at conversation surrounding the phrase ”I can’t wait” online, and finding out what we’re most looking forward to right now.

Let’s get to it.

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Raring to go

As a starting point, we wanted to see if “I can’t wait” mentions had increased. With normal life heavily curtailed, it makes sense we’d talk more about things we can’t wait to do.

Using Brandwatch Consumer Research, we created a query to collect any posts to Twitter or Reddit containing the phrase (and variations of) “I can’t wait”. Here’s what we found.

We can see a marked increase in these mentions after the pandemic was declared in March. This continued to rise until the end of the year, and while there was a small drop going into 2021, levels are still way above what they were in 2019, and holding steady.

When we looked at the emotion of these mentions, of the ones we categorized, 56% were joyful. That tells us that this conversation has lots of positivity and excitement. The question is, what are people getting so excited about?

To delve deeper, we used our topic cloud functionality to find the most common phrases used in the “I can’t wait” conversation. This gives us an idea of the kind of language people use in these posts.

The top three are all about different types of media. Hearing refers to music, watching to TV shows and films, and reading to books. The volume for all three is very high too, showing the wealth of data that’s out there.

Unsurprisingly the mentions cover a huge range of books, films, and TV shows, so there were no big themes we could pull out, except a ton of conversation around the K-pop band BTS.

But as we noted, there’s plenty of scope to get more specific within these topics to find the trends and insights that are useful to you.

What we want to do

Next, we narrowed things down and looked into the activities people say they can’t wait to do.

Seeing family is way, way out in front. And with friends coming second, this data tallies with our bulletin on New Year’s resolutions, which showed an increased want to see friends and families.

Going out for a drink comes in third, and we imagine there’s plenty of crossover with seeing family and friends there as well. Meanwhile going on holiday also ranked highly which will come as little surprise to most.

All in all, there’s nothing unexpected in the list, but it does show that many of us can’t wait to get back to some normalcy and the socializing that comes with it. Let’s hope we can get there sooner rather than later.

What should we cover next?

Is there a topic, trend, or industry you’d like us to feature in the Brandwatch Bulletin? We want to hear your ideas to make sure our readers are getting what they want. We may even ask to interview you if you’re involved with the topic.

Send any and all ideas to [email protected] and let’s talk.

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Stay safe,