Thanksgiving through social media

In an era of selfies, food photos and self-rants, there can still be a lot of room for sincere social interaction.

A new research conducted by Marketwired shows gratitude can be shared across segments of netizens from around the world. In fact, the company tallied mentions of “thankful,” “thanks,” and “thank yous” to more than a billion.

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“I found that the number of times ‘thanks’ or ‘thank you’ were mentioned this year was quite large,” according to Sheldon Levine, director of community at Sysomos. “It actually works out to those words appearing in social channels well over 2 million times a day.” 

A big chunk of grateful words was floated on Twitter.  In general, most users were thankful for “life,” with “friends” besting “family” and “work” rounding out the top fourth topic.

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“Marketwired calculated 951,770,752 tweets, including messages of gratitude, this year. That compares favorably to 48,093,584 mentions in forum posts; 10,236,979 words of thanks in blog posts; and 4,372,346 mentions in online news articles.”

What was pleasantly surprising for Levine was that people were most thankful for “life.” He surmised that the respondents were making reference to the life they lead.  While a number of people’s posts would focus on disappointments – like heartaches and the occasional rant over the boss – “life” topping the list is reflective of the fact that more people are generally happy with what they have. 

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John Bohan is the founder and general manager of SocialTyze, an Internet firm that specializes in social marketing solutions.  Read more information on social media in this Google+ page.