Don’t tell Grandma, but the days of going around the Thanksgiving table to say what everybody is thankful for may be over. Or, at least, the tradition may have evolved thanks to social media. Last year, Facebook Data Science released a Thanksgiving-themed data study that aggregated and processed facebook posts in order to analyze the ‘thankfulness’ of users from a variety of angles. Some of the results, which were broken down with colorful charts and graphs, were exactly what you would expect (friends and family were the two things most grateful for), but others were more compelling.
When the data was broken up by State, the results got particularly interesting. What were people most thankful for in the Southwest? Rain! Deep South? Religion! — with the exception of Louisiana: Rainbows? I’m a little confounded by our Illinois response, and I have to admit a slight urge to move to Washington based on theirs. Also, did you see how much technology popped up on here? Google, Youtube, Netflix, and Pinterest each won over their own state.
Also, males and females were (surprise!) thankful for quite different things. After the obvious #1 (wives), ‘sobriety’ and ‘recovery’ took the next two hits for men, with ‘football’ coming in soon after, and, eventually…’food.’ Women, after husbands, we’re thankful for ‘boyfriends,’ ‘babies,’ ‘fur-babies,’ and ‘wine.’ Interestingly enough, men didn’t list any of those things, and ‘girlfriends’ only made their way onto the men’s list underneath ‘the internet.’ Based on the analysis of user ages, it is clear that younger people are more thankful for things like ‘music’ and ‘coffee,’ while older folks are more likely to be thankful for ‘spouses’ and ‘children.’ Not much of a surprise there, though.
When it came to the popularity of ‘gratefulness’ posts, it was all about social support for issues like sobriety and recovery. Those were overwhelmingly popular based on Facebook likes, along with the encouraging status of ‘I love what I do.’
Here at Adeptia, we can definitely identify with that last one. On top of that, if you could read our data, you’d see that YOU are high up on our list of things we’re thankful for. We’re grateful for fantastic relationships with our customers, and we’re grateful to be able to provide a truly unique B2B integration solution that is helpful to so many companies. So from all of us at Adeptia, Happy Thanksgiving!