It’s the question you’re not really allowed to answer.
Like who is your favorite child or why was my dog taken to the farm, who do you love more your Mom or your Dad, is one of those questions that shouldn't be asked, let alone answered.
But never fear, Talkwalker are ready to wade into these murky waters to answer the big questions so you don’t have to.
Entirely against the spirit of the occasion, we used our social media analytics to look at who was getting the most love – Moms or Dads – on social media to begin to answer this tantalizing question and find the truth, the real truth, the social media truth.
The Answer
With both Father’s Day and Mother’s Day having now passed, we analyzed over 1 million Twitter posts over the last 2 months to see which parent was receiving the most affection online. We isolated the posts to just those expressing love, respect, admiration etc for their parents and this is what we found…
There were around double the number of posts expressing love for Moms compared to Dads on Twitter
Unfortunately for the Dads, it was really no contest. Moms got around double the love of Dads with the peak unsurprisingly coming on Mother’s Day. In total, there were around 440,000 unique tweets (i.e. excluding retweets) expressing love for mothers and just over 220,000 tweets for Dads.
It was also noticeable that the majority of tweets expressing love for parents were coming from women:
Gender breakdown for tweets expressing love for fathers (left) and mothers (right)
The gender split was pretty even so there was no real preference for mothers or fathers by gender. Just a noticeable lack of social media affection from men, although one particular man managed to generate a whole load of attention for his parents.
The most shared tweet expressing love for both mothers and fathers came from one person who, it’s safe to say, has a pretty powerful effect on social media. One Mr. Bieber from Canada
Looking at the number of retweets and favorites, it seems even Justin Bieber’s Mom gets more love than Justin Bieber’s Dad!
Mother’s Day vs Father’s Day
More generally speaking, overall conversations on all media channels linked to Father’s Day and Mother’s Day were pretty equal, though Mother’s day still got slightly more attention:
Similar share of conversations for Mother's Day and Father's Day online
The most used hashtags were naturally #MothersDay and #FathersDay but on this measure, Dads just won out with 1.36m uses of #FathersDay compared to 1.22m uses of #MothersDay.
Overall #FatherDay was used slightly more often than #MothersDay
