June 25, 2018
By Maven Road
If you’ve noticed an increase in rainbow flags and colors all over social media this month; it’s because June is LGBT Pride Month. June was specifically chosen to commemorate a series of spontaneous demonstrations against the violence directed at the LGBT community in the 60s; expressly in June 1969.
Social Media has become the ideal ground for activism and dialogue — the perfect forum to support LGBT rights. Just as pride parades have increased in attendance all over the world (the biggest pride parade in the US was in New York City in 2015, with an estimated 2.1 million participants. Brazil has the lead, and the record, with 3 million participants last year), social networks certainly reflected this. With over a week left in June there are already over 5.4 million mentions on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram about #LoveWins, #LGBT, #LoveIsLove and #GayPride. Impressive, right?
#LoveWins, all by itself, has a record of 5 M mentions in social media in 2016. This is probably because the previous year same-sex marriage was established in all 50 states of the US, so audiences had a lot more to express at that time. Until June 19 of this year, the mentions of this hashtag were over the 1.7 M. #LGBT is also a highly mentioned hashtag, with more than 3.1 M mentions so far this month. For its part, #GayPride went from 183K mentions in January 2018 to 442K in this month, precisely because of the closeness of the date of the parades around the world.
According to our analysis, Instagram is the platform of choice for LGBT community conversations; accounting for 85% of the mentions analyzed. The country where these topics are discussed the most were the United States (38%), United Kingdom (7.8%) and Brazil (6.3%). It is important to point out that the conversations we analyzed were only those that used the aforementioned hashtags.
Not only did Conversations about pride increase in June, LGBT influencers saw their number of followers grow as well. The model @ColvinMelvin went from 60k followers in May to 61k this month.
Understanding the growth of these numbers offers a glimpse into a community in constant struggle against establishment. So #LoveWins and #AnalyticsWins.