GlobalData Social Media Analytics dashboard tracks online conversations of Twitter Influencers selected by GlobalData and popular Reddit channels, which enable users to analyze in-depth all critical trends emerging on social platforms in real-time.

The 2021 Year in Review report provides the list of popular trends across industries on social media in 2021. These trends cover emerging technologies, macroeconomic factors, companies, cryptos and other popular terms which were largely shared and discussed among Influencers during the year.

To summarize, the year began with the rise in dominance of Reddit community in influencing the stock prices of several companies on U.S. stock market like GameStop. The community identified more such stocks to push their prices up in the market.

Further, the trend shifted to privacy concern as WhatsApp announced their new privacy policy which received huge criticism from Influencers on social media.

Moving further, on the positive note, the trend was observed around COVID-19 vaccinations as multiple countries began vaccinating their population against COVID-19 infection. Moderna, Pfizer and AstraZeneca emerged as most mentioned companies on this topic.

The crypto universe saw huge pump in the initial months of the year, led by the impact of tweets from Elon Musk in support of Dogecoin and Bitcoin, but later, in the month of May, the market saw the downside of this dominance of Influencers, when it collapsed following tweet from Elon Musk against the acceptance of Bitcoins.

The second half of the year was dominated by the social media conversations on Metaverse and NFT technologies. Facebook rebranded itself as ‘Meta’ to align with company’s ambition to build the ‘Metaverse’. In parallel, NFTs (non-fungible tokens) have boomed in recent months. This trend has taken the world by storm as many companies have introduced their NFTs collection.

The energy crunch emerged as another trending topic during the second part of the year as multiple countries faced massive energy crisis, leading to rising fuel prices. Countries like US, Japan, India later decided to release crude oil from their strategic petroleum reserves to cool the prices.

Towards the end of the year, another variant of COVID-19 ‘Omicron’ has spread across the globe due to its high transmissible capability. Social distancing restrictions were again imposed by multiple countries in-order to curb the spread of this virus.