Every April 22, the world celebrates Earth Day, an opportunity to rally together to raise awareness of the global environmental movement. And though the first Earth Day was observed in 1970, it took more than a decade before “green” products — that is, those specifically marketed as environmentally friendly — made their way to mainstream store shelves. According to Fast Company, the number of new green household products doubled between 1989 and 1990.
Today, eco-friendly products are everywhere in every form as demand for them continues to grow. We used Explore, our social intelligence platform, to learn more about how consumers have been talking about “green” products over the past year.
Social Mention Volumes: The Christmas Day Plunge
From April 1, 2022 through March 31, 2023, there were 31.3 million social media mentions of “green” product-related keywords — including “sustainable”, “compostable”, “eco-friendly”, and “zero-waste”. That represents a 356% increase compared to the previous 12 months.
Earth Day 2022 was understandably the top day for mentions of “green” keywords, but they dipped dramatically on December 25, 2022, making Christmas an especially uncommon day for online conversations about eco-friendly products.
Top Hashtag: #Sustainable
#Sustainable was the top hashtag in the global eco-friendly conversation. It was followed by #savesoil, which refers to the global movement to fight soil degradation.
Other top hashtags included #organic, #ecofriendly, and #plantbased.
Most-Engaged Social Content: Biodegradable Packing Peanuts
The piece of content that drew the most engagement was a TikTok posted by home and cleaning influencer @homewithchloe the day after Earth Day 2022. In it, she shows off how biodegradable packing peanuts easily disintegrate under running water in her sink.
The most-shared link was the homepage of the Save Soil movement. It was followed by “How plastic pollution is choking the planet, and what’s being done about it,” a Global News article about plastic waste. Each of these pieces of content shows how eager participants in this conversation are to discover opportunities to join the fight against climate change.
Top Reddit: r/Vegan
r/Vegan, the vegan Reddit forum with more than 1.2 million members, racked up 49.3K mentions off our “green” keywords list. It was followed by r/AskReddit, the site’s advice forum, and r/ZeroWaste, a low- and zero-waste lifestyle forum.
Green Product Reviews
From April 1, 2022 through March 31, 2023, there were 130K mentions of “green” keywords across product reviews, at an average of 357 per day. Excluding reviews marked as posted as part of a promotion, mentions were again fewest on Christmas Day 2022. However, they spiked on April 11, 2022, with “food” and “plant” among the top keywords.
Food and drink products were the top topics of these reviews. Home and garden as well as beauty and fitness products were also highly-mentioned.
Customer Journeys
We used an Explore comparison search and custom category filters to analyze our results according to customer journey stage:
- Want It, including phrases people use to find products like “where do I find” and “looking for recommendations”
- Get It, including phrases and keywords people use to talk about purchases, such as “placed an order” or “buying”
- Use It, including phrases people use to talk about products they have, such as “I used” or “we’re wearing”
- Promote It, including phrases people use to promote products, such as “worth getting” or “I recommend”
We then used those filters to see which customer journey stage has the highest shares of voice across five top social networks: Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Wechat, and TikTok.
Our results show that TikTok, Pinterest, and Reddit are the top channels for promoting eco-friendly products and finding recommendations. Consumers head to Twitter to talk about the products they’ve just purchased. Meanwhile, Wechat has the highest proportion of mentions of consumers talking about products they are using.
Green Keyword Takeaways
From product reviews to social media touch points like r/Vegan and #sustainable, consumers look to one another to discover effective “green” products online. Reddit may be joining platforms like TikTok and Pinterest as a top product discovery destination. As Earth Day comes and goes, so does a good amount of eco-focused marketing messaging. But brands committed to fighting the climate crisis all year long may have opportunities to differentiate themselves during the holiday season.
Want to learn how to extract insights like these for your brand? Schedule a demo today to see what Meltwater’s social intelligence solutions can do for you.
