June 6, 2018
By Maven Road
On May 19th, Meghan Markle married Prince Harry at St. George’s Chapel in Windsor Castle after a thrilling (and initially secret) courtship. Even if you didn’t feel like turning on the TV at the crack of dawn; it was almost impossible to escape all the royal wedding talk when logging into your social networks. That’s the main difference between past and present royal weddings; not even royalty can escape the fact that social media is part of our everyday lexicon.
Our analysts couldn’t resist looking inside royal wedding data since the dawn of the Internet era. There is an ironic fact about this large-scale event: on the day where she received the highest number of mentions on digital platforms ever, Meghan didn’t have an official handle on any social network due to royal requirements necessary to wed Harry (she eliminated her social handles in January 2018). When Meghan was an active Instagram and Twitter user, her number of followers shot through the roof after it was confirmed that she was dating the prince in 2016 (from 385K to 452K in days).
Analysis of Twitter mentions revealed that there were 6.03M mentions of ‘Royal Wedding’ on May 19th. When looking at a comparison of the U.S. and U.K. markets by volume of Twitter mentions about the event, the United States commanded the lead by a wide margin. More than 31% of mentions of the Royal Wedding occurred in the U.S. on the big day, compared to 17% in the U.K. (It should be noted, of course, that the U.S. has about five times the population of the U.K., and only about four times the number of social media mentions.)
As with most weddings, the bride received more attention than her groom, with Twitter mentions of Meghan Markle outpacing Prince Harry mentions by a large margin; on May 19th there were more than 588K mentions for Meghan (USA 47.85%, UK 11.37%) compared to about 505K for Prince Harry (USA: 49.44%, UK: 15.57%). What a way for newlyweds to start their life!
After taking a quick look at these Royal Wedding numbers we hope you now have a better understanding of its magnitude, and you can see the enormous impact it had on society worldwide. That’s the magic about analytics: by giving us perspective, they affect the way we see things.
Maven Road
A global business intelligence firm focused on creating lean, actionable consumer and audience intelligence. Our knowledge and expertise allows our customers to reach new pockets of consumer data that would otherwise remain untapped. Our Big Data, Machine Learning Models and Advanced Analytics help global brands stay ahead of the market.