A social listening report from Capstone-Intel revealed that the recently concluded Sinulog 2024, which was the first celebration after the country suffered the COVID-19 pandemic, has received 26,714,853 social media reach, marking the festival’s effective social media campaign throughout the duration of the study.
Capstone-Intel Corporation is a high-impact research company that uses innovative research technologies, tools, and methods to convert data and information into breakthrough insights and actionable intelligence outputs. It is committed to helping its clients solve problems, find solutions, grow markets and constituencies, build reputations, navigate risks, manage crises, and be the country’s leading private research and intelligence agency.
Background
The Sinulog Festival is a celebration honoring the Santo Niño, also known as the Holy Child of Jesus. It is celebrated every third Sunday of January annually. For this year, the Sinulog Festival was held on January 21, with over 3 million devotees attending the Sinulog Grand Mardi Gras at the South Road Properties in Cebu City.
Methodology
Capstone-Intel Corp. examined the online presence of the Sinulog Festival in the country as a topic of discussion over the past three weeks, from January 1, 2024, to January 22, 2024, by utilizing all publicly accessible posts from social and non-social media platforms in order to gather the sentiments of the public about the return of the annual tradition.
Facebook Performance
Capstone-Intel found that the observance of the Sinulog Festival garnered a 523,066.7 engagement score for its 6,241 total post count, which yielded over 1,788,515 total reaction count. When broken down, “Facebook like” accounts for 48.3 percent of the total reactions, with 864,601. Followed by “Facebook love” with 808,041 reactions (45.2 percent), “Facebook haha” with 49,911 (2.8 percent), “Facebook sad” with 32,617 (1.8 percent), “Facebook wow” with 26,643 (1.5 percent), and “Facebook angry” with 6,704 reactions (0.4 percent).
Over the course of the last three weeks, Capstone-Intel has discovered that a sizable portion of believers have been embracing their religious beliefs along with the evolving digital landscape and accessibility to online platforms. This is evident in the large number of social media users, as demonstrated by the quantity of “Facebook like” reactions and “Facebook love,” which indicates that more Filipinos are now using the digital space to practice their faith.
Countless Filipinos have been mobilizing on social media over the last three weeks to celebrate the feast of the Holy Child of Jesus, and this is also worth noting in relation to the number of posts related to the Sinulog Festival. The valuable online presence of the celebration was enhanced by the increasing activity of Santo Nino followers online, particularly on Facebook.
Massive online influence
Capstone-Intel likewise revealed that the Sinulog Festival alone received 96.9 percent positive mentions, and the remaining 3.1 percent were negative mentions. This means that the article mentions that the Sinulog Festival was mostly angled positively. In a nutshell, this data only means that the posts mentioning “Sinulog Festival” are threads with “potentially positive sentiments” among social media users.
The research agency likewise identified that “Sinulog Festival” received 26,714,853 social media reach, while its non-social media reach yielded over 1,663,264 non-social media reach. It also produced a total of 115,633 social media interactions.
Countries reaching ‘Sinulog Festival’
According to Capstone-Intel’s data, aside from the Philippines, which has reached an overall 3,474,785 Filipino online users, it has also reached audiences in several countries, including the following:
- United States– 252,156
- France – 155 647
- Sri Lanka – 143,700
- India – 47,617
- Ireland – 11,800
- United Arab Emirates – 5,130
- Russia – 4,704
- China – 2,500
- Australia – 2,343
Top posts
In terms of top posts, the top three posts for the Sinulog Festival were videos of the festivities, particularly the fluvial procession, the traditional Sinulog dance, and Sinulog sa Sugbo Philippines 2024.
This explains why the peak of COVID-19, which encouraged the use of live streaming to increase the online visibility of a particular religious activity, has proven to be an effective way to interact with followers and other believers without requiring them to be physically present in the vicinity of the celebrations.
The country’s large online presence of the Sinulog Festival can be attributed to two factors: the fear of catching COVID-19 illness and the ease of access to online platforms.
