Notably, Saturday and Sunday are never the most active days, reflecting how social media use generally decreases at the weekend. This is a useful benchmark though: if your brand’s mentions suddenly spike on Saturday or Sunday, you best pay attention. Most likely either something very good or something very bad has happened.

Food services has one of the more interesting trends in the table. It peaks on Monday, presumably buoyed by people exhausted from the weekend and the first day of the working week eating out and ordering in. Mentions then fall through the week before a jump on Saturday as consumers forsake their kitchens again.

Entertainment also stands out as the only industry to see mentions peak on a Friday. It also sees a far more even spread of mentions throughout the week. Considering the broadness of this category, both in entertainment types and how we entertain ourselves, this should be a surprise.

We can see this again when we compare weekdays to the weekend.

Some quick math to set a baseline: the weekend makes up 28.57% of the week.

As we saw in the table before, this shows in all industries, there are a disproportionate amount of mentions on weekdays.

The entertainment industry comes closest to an even spread, as we mentioned. Food services, fashion, retail, and auto aren’t far off either.

At the other end of the spectrum is pharma. For such a wide-ranging industry, it’s hard to pinpoint a single reason for the lack of weekend posts. But some emotion analysis proffers at least one contributor.

The pharma conversation is the most negative of the lot, with just 15% of mentions being joyful. It also tops the list for sadness and fear. With many using their weekends to relax and put the stresses of everyday life out of their mind, it makes sense they don’t want to spend their free time posting about such a negative and serious topic.

There are some data points here that won’t come as a surprise. Telecoms and consumer tech are way ahead of the other industries when it comes to anger. From long call waiting times to expensive gadgets breaking down, we don’t blame people for wanting to vent.

On a more positive note, retail, fashion, and entertainment come out on top for joyful mentions by a wide margin. If you’re ever considering getting into social media management, these are the industries to aim for.

For a ton more data and analysis like the above, plus five extra industries, be sure to read our State of Social report. You won’t regret it.

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See you next time,

The Brandwatch Bulletin team