Budget conversation on social media doubles over last year, finds 25AM

This is one of the key findings from social media data gathered and analysed in the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Social Studio software by 25AM.

Twitter dominated social media discussions about the budget, with journalists’ live tweets and news reports helping to drive the conversation.

#Budget2016 was the most commonly used hashtag, followed by #budgetspeech2016 and #pravingordhan. The proposed #sugartax attracted a lot of attention from social media users; state-owned entities - particularly South African Airways and its chair Dudu Myeni— were also hot topics of discussion.

The majority of discussion about the Budget Speech was factual and neutral in sentiment. However, there were nearly equal amounts of positive and negative mentions of the Budget Speech, indicating that opinions were split about whether Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan succeeded in restoring confidence to the South African consumers and businesses following the Nenegate debacle of late 2015.

Interestingly, the Budget Speech drove significantly less conversation than the State of Nation address earlier this month. There were more than 255 000 South African mentions around #SONA2016, compared to around 57 000 Budget conversations. There were more than twice as many negative social media comments about #SONA2016 than there were positive comments.

Says 25AM CEO Andre Steenekamp: “Our reading of social media conversation for the Budget Speech shows that South Africans depend on social media and especially Twitter for up-to-the-second breaking news. An event such as the Budget Speech lends itself to social media conversation because it affects everyone’s finances, and people are interested in blow-by-blow commentary on how the budget will affect their pockets.”

For more information, visit www.25am.net. Alternatively, connect with them on Facebook or on Twitter.