#Loadshedding by the social media numbers

Load shedding is back – this time with damage to the Majuba power station coal storage silo.

What does this mean for South Africa? Load shedding that could last for the rest of the week. What does this mean for social media? More mentions! Here are the stats:

Top 10 tweeters:

Top tweeters are determined by on topic posts, comment counts, likes and votes and engagement in general.

*Competition is tight between Helen Zille, Gareth Cliff and Rich Simmonds.

Top 10 tweeters.

Mentions on Eskom, load shedding and electricity:

Yesterday saw over 25 000 topic relevant mentions. Of this about 11 00 mentioned Eskom, about 10 000 mentioned load shedding and about 4 000 mentioned electricity.

Word cloud:
Based on our topic profile, the word cloud below shows the summary of the most mentioned words relating to Eskom, load shedding and electricity.

Digital channel pie chart:
Channels talking about load shedding are broken down by the number of posts each channel received. Twitter showed highest topic activity with a 93.6% count.

After seeing the stats, the top five brands in South Africa on Facebook and Twitter were looked at to see how they incorporated the trend into their online conversations.

On Facebook, only Gumtree took advantage of the topic by creating a post to promote its app.

And on Twitter, only Woolworths took to the opportunity – urging their followers to rather buy chicken at Woolworths than worrying about cooking.

No need to cook tonight Buy 2 rotisserie chickens, get the 2nd 1/2 price + 2 2L Cokes for R25: http://t.co/70VxXauZa1 pic.twitter.com/vOlM6ebXrM

— Woolworths SA (@WOOLWORTHS_SA) November 3, 2014

With social media being such immediate streams of information – people looking to it for news and creating their own news streams – isn’t it time for brands to do start doing more and listen less?

Image: L.C. Nøttaasen via Flickr.