Covid-19 Daily Bulletin 04/06: Pandemic Investing and Safety Fears

Passing time with penny stocks.

Welcome back. Today we’re taking a look at people’s health and safety fears, along with the rise of pandemic investing.

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Future health and safety

For many businesses that have had to close due to the outbreak, the day they can get consumers flowing back through their doors can’t come soon enough. The question is, will those consumers feel safe coming back?

Using Brandwatch Qriously, we’ve been surveying thousands of adults from around the world through their smartphones and tablets. We asked them about how safe they’d feel going to various events and businesses in person once lockdown measures were lifted.

Here’s what they told us.

As you’d expect, a lot of people are still very wary of getting out and about. This is particularly the case for concerts and sports events – 38% and 34% of people respectively said they would not feel safe at all attending them.

At the other end of the spectrum, we see beaches and shops.

Beaches have received a lot of press attention recently, especially as people flocked to them during warm weather and to enjoy new-found freedoms. This tallies with our survey results, in which 26% of people (the highest number reported for this metric) said they’d feel very safe visiting the beach.

There’s also good news for shops, with far more people seeing them as very safe than not safe at all. Of course, there’s still a long way to g,o and stores probably won’t see normal levels of trade immediately upon reopening. Safety measures that will help convince customers to enter will almost certainly be part of the ‘new normal’.

Having said that, there are signs that people’s confidence in stores getting safety right is growing.

In our last two surveys, the gap between those seeing stores as safe and those who don’t think they’re safe at all has been growing in an encouraging way. Many of these businesses have been putting huge efforts into making social distancing easier in store, and it looks like these actions are putting more people at ease.

While restaurants have a longer way to go than shops, there’s a similar trend here.

The ‘Not at all’ group still outnumbers the ‘Very’ one, but if things continue, that won’t be the case for long.

Museums join restaurants and shops in the trend, but are further behind and progress has actually slowed in recent weeks.

Not as much attention has been paid to museums and their Covid-19 preparations compared to shops and restaurants. This may explain the trepidation reported in our survey. Clearly, they’ll need to put a lot of effort into communicating with potential visitors and allaying any safety fears.

Trading places: Stock market rookies try their hand

According to Google Trends, search interest for “investing” hit a five-year high in March and is still way up compared to normal levels.

We wanted to know what was behind the trend, so we took a look at online mentions of investing using our Consumer Research platform.

Lockdowns seem to have inspired people to invest. Social posts mentioning investing have spiked this year, with April and May mentions up 50% and 37% respectively compared to average levels for those months.

This is extremely interesting considering the decrease in interest in January and February. Mentions in these months were well below the average volumes in the years prior, decreasing by 43% and 36% respectively.

Low stock prices piqued interest from people in the last three months, with 42k mentions. But it wasn’t just the lower price of stocks hooking people in. We found 388k mentions of Bitcoin too, an increase of 136% compared to the three months prior.

Mentions of investing in gold (traditionally considered a safe and consistent investment) during March and May also increased, up 67% compared to the three months prior.

But investing in the real estate market wasn’t as favored. There were only 12k mentions in the last three months, actually down from pre-pandemic levels. We found people expressing low confidence in the housing market bouncing back as quickly as others in social conversations.

Using BuzzSumo, we saw that rookies were using YouTube to learn how to invest and reap rewards from the downturn of markets around the world. The platform’s investment content had 613k engagements in the last three months, a year-on-year increase of 69%. It’s worth noting here that YouTube isn’t necessarily the best place to find high quality investment advice, and this could leave some viewers vulnerable to making bad decisions.

It’s clear that some consumers are just looking to make a quick buck. It’s also clear that those on social remain positive that the economy will bounce back (although they accept it will be some time).

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Thanks for reading

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Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team