The Relevance of Crypto Chatter on Social Media

In any domain, numbers and metrics are a very important factor today. With less and less so-called legacy setups where something is established and relevant because it always has been, the modern ventures are locked in an ongoing battle for the public’s attention. The same competitions take place both inside of individual niches and fields, but also between different industries.

This was once related to only things like esports, but the principle applies to more and more things with each passing year. The main tool in these battles is the online domain and there is no stronger element there than social media. Crypto market is no exception and every day, users and those interested in cryptocurrencies mention them on a range of social media platforms.

The context of those mentions is diverse and often meandering, but what matters is the actual conversation. More precisely, their frequency and length. How does crypto stack up against other widely-discussed topic and inside of this field, who are the front-runners when it comes to capturing the public’s imagination?

Twitter Stats

Unsurprisingly, Twitter is one of the main drivers of discussion on social media when it comes to crypto. New research on that topic found that the US is heading with the volume of tweets that are in some way referencing bitcoin. It is the dominant topic, but the research found that it is followed by a cryptocurrency that has not been launched or is not a traditional cryptocurrency at all.

Of course, this is Facebook’s Libra. The research was commissioned by a crypto trading platform called The TIE and its study found that almost 40 percent of the posts come from the US while the UK holds second place with over 10 percent. This means that the two nations account for half of all Twitter mentions of crypto. After these countries, Canada, Turkey, but also India and Australia came as the most prolific crypto mention locations, placing the last country at the end of the list. If these nations are added to the list, it appears that basically, only Turkey is a non-English speaking nation on the list.

This also means that the majority of crypto discussions and mentions take place in one language, even if it is not the native tongue of the social media users. It could be expected that the same kind of trend is seen in other countries as well, and India is a good example.

While the population is the huge nation uses a range of languages, it is more than likely that those who are discussing or mentioning an advanced cryptocurrency technology on Twitter are at least partial users of the English language. This is important in a different way which will be discussed later on.

Social Media Crypto Sentiment

The TIE research also examined the sentiment of the public engaged in these tweet-based discussions. Basically, the research tried to disseminate if the tweets had been discussing crypto and bitcoin in particular from a positive perspective or negative ones. It found that countries that had at least a half a percent of total bitcoin tweets were headed by Peru, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Italy had the most positive outlook.

This is also an interesting selection because it showcases a group of emerging economies, along with a developed nation that features a struggling economic system. In all of them, the concept of bitcoin clearly presents more of a positive opportunity than a potential negative development in the financial and tech domain. Still, there is plenty of negative sentiment as well.

This group of countries is led by Venezuela that had the majority of negative posts – 62 percent to be exact. With all of the developments related to petro, it is hardly a surprise that a big portion of the Twitter users sees the whole domain of crypto as negative. In this category are Mexico, Estonia, Brazil and finally Ireland.

All of these in one way or another pierce cryptocurrencies and bitcoin in particular as a problematic or negative phenomenon. Interestingly, the Libra is already present in the same opinion lists, even though it is very novel fintech. However, the influence that Facebook wields allowed it to frog leap the slow and gradual development of other cryptocurrencies, including bitcoin a decade ago.

Social Media Chatter as an Important Factor

On the surface, it might seem like the issue of what is being discussed on social media is not that relevant, especially for systems that are big and permanently growing, like bitcoin. However, the truth is that chatter does matter. It is not the only one element someone uses to judge a crypto network, but it is one of them.

Many new ways of calculating the stability and influence of an individual cryptocurrency network take the number of mentions as one of the key elements. As time goes by, it can be expected that this element will only become more and more important. After all, it represents the way people enter a cryptocurrency field as a whole.

The Domain of English

With the large majority of all cryptocurrency mentioned and discussion taking place in English, another pattern is also revealed. The crypto might be a global phenomenon, but like almost all IT domains, it gravitates towards the countries in the Western field of influence.

Countries like Vietnam might be very interested in the possibilities that crypto has to offer, but ultimately, very little discussion in Vietnamese will take place on social media. Most of them are western-based and provide a platform for western discussions. Currently, it appears that people are willing to enter the same space for discussions for a benefit of some type. However, as long as the discussion remains entrenched in only one language, the reach it can have will be limited.

At the same time, it is unclear how anyone or anything can allow the same information sharing to take place outside of the English language on any meaningful scale. There is no doubt that plenty of Chinese national use QQ and other domestic media equivalents to discuss crypto. But, for now, the global relevance of the same talks becomes apparent only when it uses Western platforms and the dominant Western languages.