Social Media & Stock Markets: How Much Digital Engagement Does It Take To Raise $1bn?

Let’s cut to the chase. We’ve been using BuzzSumo and Brandwatch to look at:

• Social conversation
• Headline shares / engagement
• Headlines published
• Article mentions

Of the keyword ‘Robinhood’ from 1st January 2021 – 29th January 2021, when news broke that Robinhood had managed to raise $1bn.

Note that ‘Headline’ data here includes all content (8bn+) tracked in BuzzSumo from across the web; including blogs, articles, social media forums and even YouTube videos.

Methodology for percentage uplift:

• We calculated an average of each of the above metrics for the term ‘Robinhood’ from Jan 1st – Jan 26th, as this timeframe presented fairly stable / standard engagement for Robinhood.
• We then calculated and average of each of the above metrics for the term ‘Robinhood’ from Jan 27th – Jan 29th, the peak of interest – shortly after Elon Musk got involved on Twitter, at the point Robinhood was pressured to restrict trading for GameStop shares, and up until the point of the $1bn investment.
• We then calculated the percentage uplift between the two, to show how much digital engagement growth you would theoretically need to achieve across those metrics to raise $1bn.

So, in theory you would need to boost all social discussion around your brand by a full 14,000%, and generate 60,000% more shares of articles mentioning your brand 😅

We know this is an oversimplified way of looking at things, and that you’d need a heck of a lot more than digital engagement alone to get your hands on $1bn, but we thought it would be interesting to benchmark this insight all the same!

Overall, it seems that to raise that coveted $1bn, you need to somehow generate 2,600% uplift* in engagement in both content and conversation around your brand, or a grand total of 5.7m mentions.

Sounds achievable…

😐

Interestingly, GameStop shares – ie. the shares that led to Robinhood’s $1bn investment – increased almost synchronously with digital engagement – rising by 2,400% (from $US19 to $US483 at its peak), and even more interestingly 5.7m is also the figure of the members making up the subreddit r/wallstreetbets.

Is the stock market and social media more closely linked than we first thought?

* This is not an average of the larger percentages in the earlier table (we know averaging percentages is a no no!), but rather the percentage uplift between all total engagements 1st Jan – 26th Jan, and all total engagements 27th Jan – 29th Jan.

Could the Wall Street debacle and Robinhood’s ascent have been predicted?

If you follow the social trend line above, mentions around Robinhood appeared seemingly out of the blue.

While Robinhood might have seen this extreme growth coming, based on the sheer volume of stocks being purchased via its own app, it’s safe to say that the hedgefunds that lost billions did not.

But when you study social trends, the data shows that something was brewing on the subreddit /r/wallstreetbets as far back as January 2020– so, could this all have been foreseen?