The social life of COVID-19: Early insights from social media monitoring data collected in Poland

Abstract

Research has revealed that social media data may be promising in many health threats and help to understand how people respond to them. As the outbreak of a novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) is a global pandemic, a real-time social media monitoring is needed to know the scale of this phenomenon. We have reported the frequency, reach and impact of online mentions about the COVID-19 illness taken from social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, blogs, forums, and news portals to highlight and better understand the scope of coronavirus discussion in Poland. We used SentiOne social listening tool to gather the data and perform the monitoring between 24 February 2020 to 25 March 2020. We found a total of 1,415,750 mentions related to COVID-19 which gives the average 47,192 mentions per day. 95.36% (1,350,059) of mentions were people’s updates and expressions, 4.64% (65,691) mentions were articles from news portals and social media. Males have dominated the online conversation about COVID-19 (65.32% vs 34.68% females). At the same time, women were more likely to discuss the topic on social media platforms such as: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. We concluded with theoretical and practical implications.