With St. Patrick’s Day around the corner, your business has likely been infusing social media posts and various promotions with shades of green and images of shamrocks. Just because St. Patrick’s Day is trending online, doesn’t mean posting related images will resonate with your audience. Leveraging social listening can ensure that you’re sharing posts online that are relevant to your audience — whether that means jumping on the St. Patrick’s Day bandwagon or not. 

We used our social listening to comb through thousands of mentions across the United States about St. Patrick’s Day on various social media channels over the last year. 

Our Findings

We leveraged our own internal platform to listen for specific keywords like #happystpatricksday and #stpatricksdayparade across all social media platforms. We then filtered the results to find mentions referring to various St. Patrick’s Day festivities. That data helped us to see the ratio of the states that mention St. Patrick’s Day the most — that is, the percentage of mentions of St. Patrick’s Day to the percentage of the U.S. population. 

Our team examined the data to find results that were both expected and surprising. For example, Illinois and Massachusetts had two of the highest ratios across the country. Here’s a breakdown of their mentions:

• Illinois: 196 mentions of St. Patrick’s Day per 100,000 people
• Massachusetts: 221 mentions of St. Patrick’s Day per 100,000 people 

But with historically Irish cities like Chicago and Boston, that’s not a surprise. However, Nevada and Washington aren’t necessarily known for high Irish populations, yet they ranked among the highest for St. Patrick’s Day mentions in the country. Here’s a breakdown of their mentions:

• Nevada: 217 mentions of St. Patrick’s Day per 100,000 people
• Washington: 222 mentions of St. Patrick’s Day per 100,000 people 

Perhaps even more surprising was New York’s results. New York City has a significant Irish and Catholic population. Yet the data showed that New York residents only mentioned St. Patrick’s Day 6 times per 100,000 people.

Using Social Listening for Business

With data from every state, our team was able to create a heat map of St. Patrick’s Day social media mentions across the US. The darker a color is, the more residents of that state mentioned St. Patrick’s Day over the last year. This map serves a dual purpose. Not only is it a fun way for Reputation to join in St. Patrick’s Day conversations across social media, but it’s an eye-catching way to display our data. 

While social listening tools don’t have the capabilities to make designed assets like the one above, they do function as the building blocks. Social listening gathers real-time, relevant data about whatever online conversations you want to track. Platforms like ours provide the ability to track items such as trending phrases in the conversation, general sentiment, and users with the most reach discussing the topic at hand. 

With data like this at your fingertips, the opportunities are limitless. Here are just a few ways to use social listening data:

• Brand Experience — Track your brand’s perception by following mentions, sentiment, spread, and reach.
• Customer Experience — Monitor what’s being said about your brand online, even if your company isn’t tagged.
• Crisis Management — If sentiment plummets, take action toward mitigation, preparedness, response, and recovery.
• Competitor Analysis — Benchmark yourself against the competition to see where they excel and where you can beat them
• Content Strategy — Generate content based on topics your customers are discussing online.
• Influencer Marketing — Identify potential influencers to discuss your brand online and help reach new audiences.

While social listening can help to create eye-catching graphics, it’s so much more than that. Social analytics and management tools can help businesses enhance their customer journey and capitalize on the results. 

Learn more about our social listening solutions