Word of Mouth - The true meaning of Easter

There has been a lot of talk about buzz analysis as a prediction tool, a la Obama, and its invaluable use in generating consumer insight.

This month Jam, i-level's social media unit, tries to answer a much more serious issue: Easter - is chocolate bigger than Jesus? As custom dictates the nation has been indulging in some serious binge-eating during April, helping chocolate makers fight back against the dieting world.

Volume of Twitter posts featuring ‘Easter'. Source: twist.flaptor.com

From the obligatory Twitter trends graph, tweets around the topic "Easter" grew steadily towards the weekend culminating, according to Twist, in nearly 20% of tweets by 4pm Sunday. But what were they talking about? Are people missing the ‘true meaning' of Easter (to celebrate the re-birth of Jesus Christ)? Or are they too busy feasting on chocolate rabbits?

Looking at the buzz around Easter the answer appears to be yes to the latter (but only just). Richard Dawkins 1 Ned Flanders 0

Posts mentioning ‘Easter' along with one other keyword (Holiday, Chocolate or Jesus). Source: Brandwatch

The graph above shows that another topic muscled its way into the scene. When looking at the posts featuring the word ‘Easter', holidays clearly dominated conversation. It appears people have far more to say about Easter as a holiday break than they do about Jesus or chocolate. Judith Chalmers 1 Willy Wonka 0

So, chocolate and holidays saw more buzz than Jesus. However, rather than looking at the top holiday destinations Jam decided it would be more interesting to see which chocolate brands were generating the most buzz. Did the Crème Eggs ‘here today, goo tomorrow' campaign get people talking?

Posts mentioning ‘Easter' along with one other keyword with around 25 chocolate brands listed (The top three brands mentioned were: Crème Egg, Thorntons and Mini Eggs). Source: Brandwatch

The Easter battle looks to have been clearly won by Cadbury with both Crème Eggs and Mini Eggs appearing in the top three most talked about chocolate treats over Easter. Also good to see Thorntons in there, suggesting the nation stuck two fingers up at the recession and opted for some high quality chocolate delights. Indulgence 1 Recession 0

So, chocolate has taken over from the Beatles and appears to be "bigger than Jesus" online, but will holidays and chocolate prevail again next year or will we see the Pope on Twitter?

Methodology: Jam is the social media unit of i-level, digital communications agency.  Jam uses data from various sources to track buzz and conversations across the web. To suggest a Buzz topic, email rich.sutcliffe@haymarket.com