Apple, Twitter, and Google dominate media and public interest in May

The flood of news about brands isn’t slowing down any time soon, and it seems as if every day there’s something new in the headlines. 

That’s why every month we look at a rolling list of the Fortune 100 companies to see their levels of media and public interest, and spot trends within those stories. Sounds time-consuming, right? Not anymore. For the month of May, with the help of our Top People and Brands feature, which you can read about here, we were able to spot these trends instantly.

In May there were over 891k articles published that mentioned Fortune 100 companies in the headline or summary, and nearly 30M engagements to those articles. Regular readers of this blog might remember we used to go through and manually categorize the top 250 articles and use that as the basis for our observations. But now, thanks to this new feature, instead of narrowing it down ourselves, we can discover the people and brands that are driving the most interest in these conversations in just seconds. And it increases our sample size by a factor of thousands, making for a much more statistically significant analysis.

Tech brands stood out in May, but there were some other key drivers that we’ll dig into. And, of course, we’ll explore the individuals that also played a part in stirring up attention for brands.

Tech takes the headlines

In the Interest Quadrant above, Twitter, Apple, and Google all sit in the top right corner, which shows that the most media interest and the most public interest in May was in these three brands. Twitter, while earning the most engagements overall, was often mentioned tangentially in a story and not directly in a headline, which meant there was no dominant narrative for the brand in May. 

Most of the top stories about Apple were about Michael J. Fox’s documentary that premiered on AppleTV+ in early May. The Back to the Future actor has a large fan base, and several entertainment news publishers saw high engagement to their articles about the documentary. 

Google, however, was the one tech brand involved in more serious conversations. The top stories, and one of the most obvious narratives to emerge from these brands overall, was when Geoffery Hinton — also known as the Godfather of AI — quit his job at Google so he could speak up about the risks of AI in the future. The New York Times had the top article about Hinton, and earned over 88k engagements.

Target and the woke conversation

Target has been at the forefront of conversations around corporations going “woke”, spearheaded by conservative media outlets’ criticism over the company’s LGBTQ+ merchandise, particularly that focused on Pride Month. This trend continued into the end of May when Target received more backlash for selling swimsuits labeled as “tuck friendly”. 

Publishers such as the Daily Wire, Fox Business, and the Daily Mail all reported on the swimsuits and have seen tens of thousands of engagements to their articles. 

Disney and DeSantis

Disney and Ron DeSantis were both included in the top people and brands in May, as the two have been caught in a “feud” for some time now. Disney announced it would no longer be moving forward with a new employee camp in Florida, and its continuing battle with Gov. DeSantis is likely a factor in the company’s decision.

DeSantis was mentioned in over 7.8k articles in May, which saw 627k engagements. The top three most engaged stories about DeSantis also include Disney, and have all earned upwards of 20k engagements. 

If you want to learn more about how you can put these data visualizations to use and uncover your own brand insights without having to sift through the noise, reach out to chat with us here.