Brandwatch Bulletin #73: What’s Changed with Climate Change?

Putting climate change interest under the microscope

16 July 2021

Hello from the team at BuzzSumo!

Our friends at Brandwatch have kindly let us hijack this bulletin to bring you our data insights and content finds of the month.

If you enjoy reading, you can subscribe to the BuzzSumo Monthly Buzz here.

In this installment, BuzzSumo’s Marketing Executive Elanor Parker shares some pretty eye-opening insights around climate change and Covid-19 – all of which were discovered while researching for our internal Green Committee newsletter.

PS While we’re talking all things “Green”, check out BuzzSumo’s latest Evergreen Mega Guide, and discover ways to create sustainable content that will bring you engagement for years to come.

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Insights of the month #1: Have we forgotten about climate change?

Humanity’s impact on our environment, global warming, and climate change have been topics given plenty of media attention for decades. But as the situation has become more desperate, is climate change still a hot topic?

Using “climate change” as a focus key term for environmental issues, we tracked its use in content headlines over the past five years using BuzzSumo’s Content Analyzer. We also looked at how many engagements (such as Facebook likes or Twitter shares) these articles received.

Since a peak in September 2019, we’ve seen a decline in both the amount of content published focused on climate change, and the total number of engagements around that content.

Between the years of 2019 and 2020, there was a 41% decrease in the number of articles published and engagements dropped by 63%.

The most drastic dip occurred when Covid-19 hit. Understandably, attention moved elsewhere.

In 2019 and early 2020, “climate change” articles were consistently published well over 15,000 times a month.

In May 2020, this dipped to 9,392, and there have only been three months throughout the pandemic where “climate change” has broken the 15,000 articles barrier.

Insights of the month #2: Climate change struggles for G7 attention

Last month the UK hosted the G7 summit, one of the most important international meetings since the pandemic began.

Looking at data from June 1 – 25, articles about the G7 saw a focus on tax, China, and the pandemic take precedence over climate change or green-focused discussion.

There have been 624 articles focusing on climate change discussions at the G7. To place that in context, there were 159 articles published that focused on UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s new wife Carrie Johnson (née Symonds) at the G7.

Insights of the month #3: The term “climate crisis” captured public attention back in 2019

The “climate crisis” began to permeate public consciousness back in 2019, and while that attention does seem to be returning, we have a long way to go before we reach the levels of interest attained before 2020.

Although the world has changed in many ways since 2019, we’re still faced with many of the same environmental challenges. Attention may decline, but climate change remains.

To explore how perceptions among specific groups are changing, take a look at Brandwatch’s case study with the Potential Energy Coalition.

You’ll learn how the nonprofit is monitoring social conversation around climate change to improve their Science Moms campaign and motivate more people to support immediate government action.”

Now to finish things off, here’s a rundown of the most popular blogs on marketing this month.

The top 5 most-shared marketing blogs this month

Google pagespeed scores updated with lighthouse 8.0

Lighthouse is a tool that helps publishers, developers, and SEOs measure page speed and other metrics related to accessibility and SEO. Google announced the release of Lighthouse 8.0 with a mix of stricter and easier scoring.

Google on how to use keywords in content

Is targeting keywords in H1, meta tags, and on-page out of date due to the advances in SEO? Google’s Senior Webmaster Trends Analyst John Mueller reveals all in his latest SEO Office Hours.

Google vows to adjust global ad technology

“Google’s platform favored itself over the competition.” Along with paying a $268 million fine, Google agreed to adjust its ad technology to provide more flexibility and transparency.

5 simple rules to boost your visual marketing ROI

Studies have shown that people respond much better to images, videos, and other visual content than they do to just text. Here are five quick tips to enhance your visual strategy.

Top 10 worst marketing disasters of all time

There is something to learn from every marketing mishap. Here are the top 10 worst marketing disasters of all time (and what you can learn from them).

Only the awesome ones make it past here

That concludes the Monthly Buzz takeover! Thanks for reading to the bottom and soaking up the data. We hope you found it interesting. If you did, you can subscribe here for monthly installments.

If you’re not yet using BuzzSumo, you can find your own top trends and content with a 30-day free trial via my.brandwatch.com.

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Cheers,

The BuzzSumo Team

PS Missed the previous Monthly Buzz installments? Check out our archive here.