As we enter into the second month of the coronavirus spread from China, interest seems to be shifting towards how we combat the spread of coronavirus. This seems to be especially the case for Japan.
I would like to look into trends that is taking place in Twitter, analyzing what the market is tweeting about, exploring the opportunities and the recommended actions for advertisers interested in taking advantage of this trend.
Hashtags such as #telework in Japanese is rising in use by approximately 248% in the past 8 weeks according to 1Hashtagifgy (Chart 1). The olympics will be held this coming Summer and the society has already been preparing for mobile work to resolve any potential traffic congestion issues in and around urban Tokyo. This preparation now seems to be accelerated because various organizations including businesses are thinking about protecting their employees from being exposed to the virus.
Chart 1
On the other hand, we can see the fall in the use of hashtag #Tokyo2020 by approximately 60% in the same period (Chart 2) which may show that the Twitter community’s interest and attention is shifting away from one of the highlights in 2020.
Chart 2
We are seeing a similar trend in the volume of keywords used in the tweets such as telework (Chart 3), remote work etc. where there was between 151% and 15,612% increase between January 20th and February 19th, according to 2Yahoo Japan Real Time Search.
Chart 3
But the interesting finding is that the keyword workplace transformation has not yet caught up with this growing trend. (Chart 4) As the government involvement of this movement increases due to the virus spread, this keyword can potentially increase in usage in the Tweets as well. This may show that the organizations are still in the preliminary phase of telework.
Chart 4
It is recommended that the advertisers in the workplace transformation, mobility space began to prepare to capture any opportunity in this growing trend in the Twitter community as the audience engagement is expected to increase in the coming weeks. Apart from this, audience attention and interest regarding the olympics needs to be monitored.
Source:
1 Hashtagify https://hashtagify.me/
2 Yahoo Japan Real Time Search https://search.yahoo.co.jp/realtime