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Engaging with the Engagement

November 27, 2017 — by

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their engagement to be married this morning at 10am, ending months of anticipation and starting more months of a different sort of anticipation. We took a look at the social media conversation in the hours immediately after the announcement and can now exclusively reveal that people are definitely talking about this breaking news.

Credit: Euan Cherry/WENN.com

The story was received with much more positivity than negativity, with 36% positivity to 7% negativity (57% neutral). The top 3 trending emotions being expressed in the aftermath of the announcement were “delighted”, “congratulations” and “loved”. The official announcement by Kensington Palace certainly underlined the positivity with a picture of the couple laughing together.

Looking at emotional reactions, it’s perhaps unsurprising that the overwhelming majority of emotion bearing tweets expressed happiness (67.3%) and love (20.5%). 87.8% of emotional tweets therefore contributed to the overall sense that people were very excited for the couple and the imminent wedding.

Some of that happiness was because of the day off usually associated with royal events. Twitter users were quick to jump to the conclusion that we would all be getting the day off, perhaps unfairly overlooking the real reason for happiness…!

As one British institution announced its good news, another offered its congratulations in typically understated style…

Fans of the TV series Suits, in which Meghan Markle stars, were also quick to joke about her ties to Mike in the show and how that might affect her relationship with Prince Harry going forward.

Of course, as Prince Harry is marrying an American woman, there were rumours about who might or might not be invited, including jokes at the expense of someone who recently tweeted about turning down an award from Time magazine…

And finally, JOE.co.uk had possibly the most brilliantly original way of flipping the narrative.

Of course, there were some who were less happy with the announcement. When we filtered results to show only those displaying anger (7.4%), the key term used was “stupid”. There was also an article from the Spectator which provoked a backlash as it questioned Meghan Markle’s suitability for Prince Harry, given her past marriage history.

It’s clear that the Royal Family are a huge attraction to a worldwide audience, given the vast spread of conversation around the globe. Bearing in mind that we only collected tweets in English there is undoubtedly even more conversation going on around the world as excitement will surely build from now until Spring 2018 when the couple will tie the knot.

And if you want even more coverage of the announcement, watch any news channel or broadcast anytime for the next few days! There’s a special interview tonight on the BBC News though, for those who are really keen.



If you want to find out more about how our social media analytics can help you analyse the response to global events or generate great content around the time of the wedding itself, contact Ali at alistair@blurrt.co.uk