2021: A Year in Review

Brandwatch Bulletin #100: A Year in Review

It wasn't all bad.

17 December 2021

We take a look at what social media data can tell us about 2021, what we achieved, and why it wasn’t all bad news.

Let’s get to it.

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A look on the bright side

To do this we looked up some old queries, wrote some new ones, and then collected mentions from Twitter, Reddit, and forums. With everyone trying to wrap up for the holidays and needing some well-deserved rest, let’s get straight into it.

There were over 500k posts about people baking some homemade treats, including about 31,820 loaves of bread, 43,934 cookies, and 22,143 pies.
Despite lockdowns and restrictions, people didn’t give up partying. We found 190,171 mentions of being hungover, with New Year’s Day seeing 5k of them.
There were 51,972,246 cat pictures posted compared to 45,307,907 dog ones. When looking at both cat and dog pictures, people in Japan posted the most by far with 28,240 per person, followed by the United Kingdom on 20,595, and the Republic of Ireland with 19,290.

Here’s the most upvoted cat picture on Reddit this year:

And the most upvoted dog one:

People made sure to keep fit in 2021 too, with users sharing 65,442 workouts of all kinds.
Plenty of people were in a charitable mood as well, with 3,498,560 links to fundraisers shared raising millions of dollars in the process.
The year’s top emojis offer some laughter, hope, and love.

Here’s to 2022

Who knows what next year will bring, but according to at least 12,575 users, it’s going to be better than 2021.

We hope that’s the case, and we hope you all have a safe, healthy, and enjoyable time between now and New Year’s Day.

We’ll be back with the Brandwatch Bulletin on January 7. And if you’re not subscribed already, you can do so here.

See you then,

The Brandwatch React team

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