It's Latte Time!
School has started back for most students in Atlanta and even though Fall has not officially begun, Friday night football is in full swing. Temperatures are still hitting 90 degrees by the afternoon but you can start to see the leaves beginning to fall from the trees. Seeing all the back to school supplies filling the shelves in Target and the countdown begins at home to the first day of school, you know it will not be long till you start seeing those three words all over Twitter and Instagram, Pumpkin Spice Latte!
Starbucks released the Pumpkin Spice Latte in 2003. Over the years, it has become one of the highest selling drinks due to it being only sold during the Fall season. In early August, rumors began that the release date of the cult classic drink could come much earlier than last year’s September 5th debut. Then on Tuesday, August 28, the limited-time Pumpkin Spice Latte was released. This is the first time since 2014 that Starbucks has released the drink in August.
Unless you are anti-social media, it is hard not to know about the drink. It seems once teachers go back to school or when you scroll through social media there is some mention of the drink. Whether it is a meme or fashion wear there are those waiting in anticipation for the drink.
(source: https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1023382-pumpkin-spice-latte)
(source: https://www.etsy.com/listing/628634645/but-first-pumpkin-spice-latte-shirt?ref=shop_home_active_7)
For this social media monitoring report, I decided I would look at the public’s anticipation of the drink and focus on the hashtags #pumpkinspicelatte, #psl, and once it was announced, #pumpkinspiceinaugust. I only observed my findings on Twitter and Instagram. I looked at the mentions that began on August 1 – 31, 2018.
Using the software Keyhole, I tracked these hashtags and gathered that there have been over 10,251 posts about this drink. Of these posts, 9,607 posts were by unique users. These posts have a reach of over 27 million viewers. (Reach is the number of unique people who may see these posts)
(Graphic created with infogram.com )
Using data from the unique posts, of those who post about the drink, 62.8% are women and 37.2% are men. That is not surprising. For example, many of the posts published on Instagram usually pairs a Pumpkin Spice Latte selfie with a woman and her fall wardrobe or her festively painted nails.
(source: instagram.com )
That’s not to say that the men are not taking selfies, there are quite a few.
(source: instagram.com )
Another set of data collected data was how frequently were the hashtags #pumpkinspicelatte, #psl, and #pumpkinspiceinaugust used. In all of the posts collected 52% of the posts mention the drink by name (#pumpkinspicelatte) while 47% mentioned the drink by its monogram (#psl). There was not a large percent in the difference between the two hashtags and seem to be used interchangeably. Since the drink was released at the end of August, 1% of the posts mention the hashtag #pumpkinspiceinaugust.
Sentiment data was interesting to collect. Keyhole uses the hashtags and searches keywords used in the posts and sorts these keywords into emotion-based categories. The data is then calculated by using positive sentiment values and dividing that total by the sum of positive and negative sentiment values. Pumpkin Spice Latte’s receive more positive than negative post telling Starbucks that there is still much love for these drinks!
(source: twitter.com )
The related topics word art show other hashtag keywords that are used in conjunction with the three tracked hashtags in Twitter and Instagram posts. The size of the words in the word art correspond to how many times the keywords were used.
According to the data collected, it shows that a majority of people were ready and excited for the release of PSL, while others cannot bring themselves to buy this hot drink while it is still summer. For over 15 years now, PSL has become a symbol of the beginning of fall. Love it or hate it, Pumpkin Spice Latte’s are not going anywhere.
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