Six out of 10 Filipinos or 64.7 percent of social media users in the country are flocking to Facebook pages of Catholic Churches, particularly to Quiapo Church, to watch livestreams dedicated to the online masses for the Lenten season, according to a social listening report from Capstone-Intel Corp.
Capstone-Intel examined the online presence of Lenten season in the country as a topic of discussion and identified the behaviors of Filipino social media users about the topic from February 14, the start of Lenten season, to March 22, by utilizing all publicly accessible posts from social and non-social media platforms to gather the sentiments of the public about the religious observance.
It found that “Lent” garnered a 976,318.7 engagement score for its 4,556 total post count, which yielded over 4,996,295 total reaction count.
“The bulk of the engagement score and total post count were all attributed to the relevance of the observance in the country, including the livestreams that most social media users tend to react to and engage in, emphasizing the reasons behind the increased presence of the topic on the platform,” it said.
When broken down, it said “Facebook love” accounts for 64.7 percent of the total reactions, with 3,234,315. Followed by “Facebook like” with 1,757,769 reactions (35.2 percent), “Facebook sad” with 1,631, “Facebook angry” with 962, “Facebook haha” with 851, and “Facebook wow” with 767 reactions.
“Looking at the data, the majority of ‘Facebook love’ reactions can be seen as the support of Filipino social media users regarding the accessibility of livestreams on the platform, as most of the top posts these users are interacting with are all livestreams from Quiapo Church dedicated to the observance of the Lenten season,” said Capstone-Intel.
It added that Lent received 100 percent positive mentions. This means that the article mentions about the religious observance were all angled positively.
“It is also worth noting that the religious observance received 292,425,197 social media reach, while its non-social media reach yielded over 410,906 non-social media reach.”
In terms of top posts, 47.8 percent of mentions for the topic came from Facebook, followed by TikTok with 22 percent, and X (formerly Twitter) with 17.8 percent of topic mentions.