The Coronavirus is the main topic of discussion since the beginning of this year, and also the current focus of concern for the vast majority of the population worldwide.
However, how has this conversation been in Social Media and, specifically, in Barcelona? We found out! ??
Whether on social networks, in traditional media or on the street, the Coronavirus is on everyone’s lips, as it is a serious issue that affects the population worldwide. Therefore, conversations about Covid-19 have been developed since the beginning of this year, from its birth in the city of Wuhan (China) until today, with the world upside down and with forced confinement in most countries.
As a Social Listening company, we have the opportunity to listen and analyze these conversations both in social networks and in other digital media, focusing on the conversation that mentions our city, Barcelona, in order to make an exhaustive analysis. Thus, we proceed to analyze how it has been and how is currently the conversation around the virus, the pandemic and the alarm state.
The data and graphs below have been compiled using data collected between Tuesday 12 March and Friday 12 April, a fair month and in a state of alarm, which began on 14 March. During this period, 1,089,368 mentions about Coronavirus and other associated terms have been collected, which we have included in the search as telework, respirators, deaths or hashtags as #StayHome. Let’s see, then, how the conversation about the pandemic has been in Barcelona.
CONVERSATION HISTORY: VOLUME & WORD CLOUDS
In total, the conversation about the pandemic has accounted for 41% of all conversation about Barcelona. Below are details of the two days with the highest volume of mentions:
[MARCH 18TH]
The day with the highest number of mentions was March 18, as a result of a conversation on Twitter, which arose when a neighbor played the song “My Heart Will Go On” on the piano on the balcony, and then another neighbor joined him on the saxophone. This led to a large number of retuits, comments and likes that explain the great volume peak of March 18th.
These are the tweets, sorted by interactions, most notably from March 18:
[APRIL 6TH]
There was also a small spike in volume on April 6, when it was made public that the mother of Pep Guardiola, current manager of the Manchester City football team, had died from the Coronavirus. Therefore, in the word cloud of that day we see prominent words like “pep”, “manchester city”, “dolors sala”, etc.
Let’s take a look at the featured tweets of that day, sorted by interaction:
KEY HASHTAGS & SENTIMENT
In our city, the most used hashtags during this isolation stage due to the Coronavirus have been, precisely, #Coronavirus, #Covid19 or #Covid-19, #Barcelona, #YoMeQuedoEnCasa, #JoEmQuedoACasa, #StayAtHome, #TanquemCatalunya or #CoronaCorrupción, among others that have been repeated day after day.
The sentiments that stand out in the overall conversation are neutral (because many mentions correspond to news) and negative, since there is talk of viruses, infections and deaths that are categorized as negative terms. As an exception, we see the positive sentiment of March 18 that relates to the conversation about the pianist on the balcony.
TOP 10 AUTHORS & CONVERSATIONS
The authors from which we have collected the most mentions are the website El Confidencial (1,470 mentions), the Twitter account for citizen attention in Barcelona @barcelona_010 (956 mentions) and the account of the Barcelona City Council @bcn_ajuntament (640 mentions). These were the mentions with the most reach in Social Media:
If we consider the conversations that have had the most interaction and reach in Barcelona, once again we come across the mention of the ‘improvised’ concert on a balcony in the city and the death of the mother of the former FC Barcelona coach. In addition, we see that the following tweets made by public figures such as @AdaColau (Ada Colau) or @yeyaboya (Mireia Boya) about the lack of sanitary material occupy the next positions of the Top 10.
LOCATIONS
With the Websays Dashboard, and specifically with the Websays Maps feature, we can display the distribution of mentions around the city. Thus, in the conversation about the Coronavirus that concerns us, the layout would look like this:
The 14,976 of the largest point stand for the authors of the clippings generically located in Barcelona, and the rest of the conversation is gathered in Les Corts, followed by Gracia. The rest is distributed throughout the city.
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