L&D Twitter Sentiment 2019–2020

Since 2016, JollyDeck has been analysing the Twitter posts of top profiles in Learning and Development, along with their followers.

When we do this analysis, we’re trying to discover the topics which were most popular in the L&D community in any given year. This is achieved through matching individual tweets to specific keywords and phrases, which in turn belong to 23 different topics. Thirsty work, right?

Most popular L&D related keywords in 2019

To start with – we’ve analysed 219,552 Twitter profiles and more than 50 million tweets. About 1.5% of those relate to one of the topics relevant to L&D, which qualified roughly 750k tweets for further examination.

• In total we analysed 23 topics relevant to L&D, of which only 15 qualified for further data analysis
• 8 topics, including previously hot topics of microlearning and curation, were not significant enough to be included in the results.

The L&D trends: a wider perspective

When we published our first L&D Twitter research in 2016, we analysed trends by looking at the monthly data sets. This way we could produce a month-to-month comparison of relevant topics and indicate the trends within a span of a single year.

Having 4 years’ worth of historical data, it is fairly safe to conclude that – at least from a data standpoint – L&D’s sentiment doesn’t change very rapidly on Twitter.

Whilst changes can be observed, it made far more sense to shift our angle a bit and compare trends over the years, rather than months.

Ch-ch-ch-ch changes

Looking at the last 4 years’ worth of data, changes are definitely happening.

Many of the topics are steadfast members of the leaderboard, but there have been some fast and unexpected shakeups.

The below graph represents topics with the most significant dips and rises from 2016–2019:

The Influencer Methodology

To create this report, we identified 36 key influencers in the L&D space. They were picked specifically because the big-wigs at JollyDeck concluded that their followers had a strong interest in L&D. Therefore, they would tweet about L&D related subjects on a fairly frequent basis.

The influencer list is refreshed yearly. Whilst it’s generally expanding as years go by, some individuals fall off the radar. This is mostly due to their inactivity or shift of focus away from the topics relevant to our report.

Interested in the full report?

There’s more interesting findings on the way. Of which a full report will be published in the coming weeks.

Send us an email on hello@jollydeck.com and we’ll happily send you a full report when it’s available. Or follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for more updates.