SG50 sets social media abuzz - all over the world: Meltwater study

Singapore

AHEAD of the national Golden Jubilee, media intelligence platform Meltwater on Wednesday released its report findings on social media buzz about SG50, publishing its results in an infographic.

"One interesting report finding is the amount of international mentions of SG50," said Neil Brennan, area director of Meltwater Japan and South East Asia. "As much as SG50 is a local celebration, Meltwater discovered that the SG50 celebratory activities have attracted attention all over the world."

Some 9 per cent of total social media buzz about SG50 came from the United States, the report found, followed by 7 per cent from Slovenia and 4 per cent from China.

SG50 items that generated the most social media buzz were BoBo's SG50 fish cake and the SG50 haircut, a trend set off by patriotic locals who have had the SG50 logo shaven onto their heads.

The most talked about National Day Parade (NDP) song online was found to be this year's NDP theme song Our Singapore, performed by local artist JJ Lin, while the most buzzed about campaign was Lego's limited edition SG50 set, reported Meltwater.

Social media platforms that the company monitored over the past month included blogs, online comments, Facebook, reviews, forums, Twitter, Wikipedia and YouTube.

To track trending conversations on social media, Meltwater computed the keyword "SG50" on its platform and generated a word cloud to find out which trending topics were buzzing around that term.

Once trending topics had been identified, relevant keywords were used to narrow the search for analysis of specific trends.

To collate data on the Fun Pack, for instance, Meltwater searched for any online posts that included the key terms "Singapore" and "fun pack".

"The study," Mr Brennan said, "is a fun and insightful way to celebrate Singapore's 50th birthday and demonstrate how our media intelligence platform can translate public sentiments into valuable insights that everyone in Singapore can relate to.

"The knowledge of such social data can help businesses to identify potential market segments, (and) key opinion leaders to plan their global marketing strategies."

In a separate study of the social airwaves, Adobe noted that there has been more than 52,000 mentions of SG50 in the last 30 days.

Special SG50 apps created to commemorate the event have also resulted in more than 150,000 downloads in under a month. Adobe's study also found that 63 per cent of the mentions expressed either joy, admiration or anticipation for the big day.

Mentions of SG50 also rose 55 per cent week on week, when comparing the week from July 28 to Aug 3 and the week from July 21 to July 27.