Consumers set up a blockbuster holiday season at the Box Office
Unless you’ve been living in a media-free cave for the past month, you are well aware of the Royal Wedding between Prince William and Kate Middleton that took place today. These nuptials mark the first major royal wedding since the dawn of the Internet era, with the last wedding of this magnitude between Prince Charles and Diana captivating the world back in 1981, almost three decades before YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter were a part of our everyday lexicon.
In addition to being a primary topic in broadcast, print and online news coverage, the Royal Wedding has taken center stage across social media outlets as well. Using Comscore’s Social Analytix™ service (powered by Radian6*), we followed global activity across social media destinations - including social networks, blogs, discussion boards and video/image sharing sites - over the course of the past month.
An analysis of social media mentions around the Royal Wedding revealed that the topic is exploding across different social media venues. Social media mentions around the topic eclipsed 1.5 million citations globally since the beginning of April. On April 27, there were more than 200,000 mentions of ‘Royal Wedding’, up 1,215% from the first of the month, as the approaching event fueled a flurry of discussion. As with most weddings, the bride captured more attention than her groom, with social media mentions of ‘Kate Middleton’ outpacing mentions of ‘Prince William’ by a decent margin. On April 27, there more than 64,000 global social media citations for ‘Kate Middleton’ compared to nearly 47,000 for ‘Prince William’.
When looking at a comparison of the U.S. and U.K. markets by volume of social media activity around the Royal Wedding the United States commanded the lead by a wide margin. Nearly more than 1 million social media mentions on the Royal Wedding occurred in the U.S. from April 1 to April 27 compared to more than 256,000 mentions in the U.K. (It should be noted, of course, that the U.S. has about 5 times the population of the U.K., and only about 4 times the number of social media mentions. That said, the U.S. is surprisingly close to the U.K. on a per person basis.)
With people tuning into the event across the world – whether it’s through live TV broadcast, DVR recording, YouTube video, Twitter feed or one of the many other ways we now consume information – it will truly be an example of the breadth of media consumption options we now have available across the globe.
*Radian6 covers over 150 million sources each day, including the broadest available coverage of: Blogs, Mainstream online news, such CNN.com, Video and Photo sharing sites, like Flickr and YouTube, Micromedia, including the full Twitter firehose and Friendfeed, Forums and Discussion Boards, Blog comments, Facebook public discussion forums. Radian6 uses a combination of RSS and other data feeds in addition to proprietary crawlers in order to index the entire social web. If data is available publicly, we’ll capture it. (That also means that data the community trusts to stay behind a wall, will; we don’t crawl or capture sites like private portions of Facebook, private communities, or anything like that.) We capture over eight million on-topic posts and comments each day, filter out the spam and irrelevant data, and deliver results to you in near real time.