Covid-19 Daily Bulletin 20/07: A Little Less Conversation

A little more engagement.

Welcome back. We hope you had restful weekends. Today we’re looking at what Covid-19 topics are driving engagement, and how the online conversation is spreading to new places.

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Big stories and nuanced conversation

It’s Monday, which means we return to our data analysis of articles published about Covid-19 and how people are discussing the virus online.

To do this, we use BuzzSumo to see how many articles are published about Covid-19 along with how many engagements they get. Engagements refer to social actions, such as Twitter shares and Facebook likes.

We then use Brandwatch Consumer Research to see how many people are discussing Covid-19 every week. We refer to this as the online Covid-19 conversation.

Finally, we index each dataset to their levels on March 2. This lets us compare them against each other every week. Here’s how things are looking now.

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.

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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

Digital Consumer Intelligence

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