Sprout Social: Twitter keywords
For most social media users, “going viral” doesn’t just happen overnight. While some people may wake up to find thousands more content views than they had yesterday, it’s all a work in progress. And with every new post you create and every new account you make, there comes more social media analytics that can help lead the way to ultimate success. Whether creating for yourself or your company, managing your social media analytics is one of the most efficient ways to push your platform to the very top.
One application that helps keep track of your business insights is Sprout Social. With Sprout Social, you can keep track of your content by scheduling posts, while also seeing how well those posts are performing on a day-to-day basis. In any social media platform, Twitter especially, hashtags can be a big way to boost your posts and expand your number of impressions and engagement. The more a certain hashtag is used, the more likely people will be to see the post associated with it.
I put 5 key words into Sprout Social to analyze their trends and patterns in relation to one another on Twitter. The words I chose are all related to my field of interest: journalism. The words are — news, fake news, journalism, reporter and breaking news. I predicted that each of these words is used plenty of times on Twitter and therefore, I wanted to compare their insights.
SOURCE: Sprout Social
Taking the lead, “news” evidently is posted about the most per day with an average of 251,049 posts per day from the period Dec. 1, 2013 to Feb. 10, 2024. The day with the most posts about “news” during this period was Jan. 8, 2020, with 4,994,784 posts. On the chart, the volume of other words are barely visible because of how popular “news” is. However, when you look at the data closer, the second-runner up word is “fake news”.
SOURCE: Sprout Social
I chose this word because I think it unveils an interesting picture of the culture around journalism in today’s age. Since “fake news” is the second most-trending of the keywords I searched, it shows an ultimate distrust in the industry. Compared to the word “journalist”, “fake news” has an average of over 10,000 more mentions per day and over 4,000 more than the word “breaking news”. The percentage of growth for fake news is also 1,531.9%, which is higher than any of the other keywords. I believe that these numbers translate to a growing distrust in the industry and can be concerning for current and aspiring journalists, like myself.
SOURCE: Sprout Social
Furthermore, “breaking news” has a declining growth rate of -28.3%, which is interesting because the chart shows a stark increase in the last month. In fact, according to Sprout Social, the word hit its peak on Jan. 30, 2024, which was only a couple of weeks ago.
SOURCE: Sprout Social
SOURCE: Sprout Social
Above are some of the Twitter posts that included the words “breaking news” on Jan. 30, 2024. Each of the accounts shown has a large number of followers and reposts which likely contributes to the popularity surrounding the word on this day.
Additionally, the word “reporter” was the one that is used the least, with an average of 704 posts per day. When looking at the data, it appears some of the sample tweets weren’t even from reporters themselves.
SOURCE: Sprout Social
Rather, they were from other accounts talking about reporters. I thought this was interesting because it’s not what I expected.
The word “journalist” is also associated with some negative tweets, not even from journalists themselves, but from readers and viewers. One example is this tweet addressing an article of the Jan. 6 riots.
Overall, doing this analysis taught me a few things that I plan to take with me in trying to grow my own platform. First, considering the recent spike in the phrase “breaking news”, I will continue to use that as I see necessary because these tweets tend to get more impressions than others. Second, with the large increase in posts with the words “fake news”, I will use this information to keep an eye out and avoid this in my comment section. As an aspiring journalist, I don’t want to draw more attention to a phrase that is hurting the business. Now that I understand how much it’s growing, I can look out for it and get rid of any of those comments. Third, I learned that the word “reporter” is not that popular and wouldn’t do as well for me as other keywords would, to my surprise. I also learned that there is a strong interest in news, even though there may be a negative aura around it. Therefore, if I keep posting things about news, it will continue to get views and even spike if I were to include words like breaking news.