10 Jan New Year’s Resolutions: Trends in Social Conversations to Kick Off 2018
It’s a new year, and that means new goals. New Year’s resolutions have long been a means to set expectations for ourselves, and looking at social conversations around resolutions, 2018 has been no different.
Conversations about resolutions began to see an upward trend starting on December 30th, and reached a peak on January 1st. People were most likely to share their resolutions as the ball dropped, with the period between 12AM-1AM EST seeing the most conversation overall.
What did people want to do?
Segmenting conversation, it was interesting to see a trend toward stopping or cutting out bad behavior in the new year, as opposed to starting or implementing new behavior. Resolutions focused on stopping behavior often focused on cutting out unsupportive, dramatic, and unhealthy relationships most.
When we got a little more granular, we were able to isolate specific themes in people’s resolutions on social. Conversation surrounding exercise and improving health overall dominated the majority of resolutions, while specific goals to lose weight weren’t as prevalent. Resolutions around learning new skills, reading more, and watching more TV/movies saw strong traction online, as did saving money.
Resolutions? Not so much.
More than a quarter of conversation around New Year’s resolutions this year came in the form of people talking about breaking their resolutions. As focus has shifted away from making hard and fast resolutions year-to-year, people were more likely to joke about their resolutions or present their goals with a more sarcastic or dubious lens. In fact, conversation about breaking resolutions actually peaked between 11AM-4PM on New Year’s Day, suggesting that people weren’t too serious about sticking to their goals.
Here’s to hoping that everyone is successful in keeping their resolutions! And if not, there’s always next year 😊
Interested to see how brands became involved in the conversations around New Year’s resolutions? Check out our Social Media Roundup! Contact us here to learn about how social listening can provide insight for your brand.
This analysis was performed using Brandwatch, looking at a sample of publicly available mentions from December 26, 2017 – January 8, 2018.
