Total engagements rose by 2% last week. While that might seem a fairly modest increase, it came after another strong week before. Engagement levels are now the second-highest they’ve been since mid-May. This also comes with a 5% drop in the number of articles, meaning publishers are getting more bang for their buck.

This latter point is incredibly important at the moment. Advertising money has been drying up as companies tighten their belts, leading to huge numbers of redundancies at publications around the world. Figuring out how to get people’s attention with less content is going to be key to survival for many (something our BuzzSumo tool can play an important role in).

We also used BuzzSumo to see what topics got the most engagements over the last week.

The topics getting the most engagement usually cover a whole range of stories, but sometimes a single story is huge enough to break through on its own.

Last week in the US it was announced that all Covid-19 data coming from hospitals should no longer be sent to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Instead, Trump’s administration is having it sent to a data company instead.

This unprecedented change to the way infectious disease data is reported in the country was of huge interest. Articles on the story received 9.6m engagements, which meant the average engagement per article rate was 10.6k. In comparison, the rate for articles about Trump stood at 3.7k.

Moving on to the online Covid-19 discussion, it’s remained steady. The size, while fluctuating a few points each way every week, has not really changed since June. The average week-on-week change since then equals 0%.

But this is only one side of the conversation. If we look elsewhere, we find a different picture.

The /r/Coronavirus subreddit, dedicated to discussing Covid-19, now boasts 2.2m subscribers. Activity peaked back in March and then dropped off week-on-week for nearly two months.

That changed at the start of June and since then we’ve seen activity increase, reaching an eight-week high last week. This suggests that while we may have reached a plateau in mentions of the virus across platforms, some are seeking out more focused, higher quality places to discuss the topic (/r/Coronavirus is strictly moderated to exclude low quality submissions).

To understand how people are discussing Covid-19, you need to take an approach that combines the overall big picture with the more nuanced conversations that break away to different locations.

Get more in-depth data

Don’t miss out on our bi-weekly report looking at consumers and how their behavior has changed due to Covid-19.

Head here to find out more and get signed up.

Thanks for reading

That’s it for today, we’ll see you tomorrow. If you’d like to get our bulletins every day, sign up here.

Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team