LONDON (Bywire News) - Vitalik Buterin, the founder of the second largest cryptocurrency, Ethereum, last week made a somewhat surprising intervention into the community of a lesser-known cryptocurrency, EOS. Answering a question on social media he declared EOS really stands for ‘Ethereum On Steroids’.
Most believed he was being sarcastic – making a snide reference to the early hype around EOS when it initially launched and then spectacularly failed to deliver under the previous regime. However, although he might have been joking, he inadvertently painted a true picture of the enormous potential EOS is now bringing to the market and the community was quick to point this out.
Leading influencers in the space such as Yves La Rose and TrimBot leapt upon the post as a chance to share information about EOS and get the message out to a much larger audience. But did it work?
If we take a look at the data around that time, including a few weeks before, we can get a sense of what the base line of activity looks like, and then we can compare it against any assumed spikes. It will be also interesting to better understand the impact influencers have on a brand. And to determine if there is an algorithmic value that can be found, based on the probable outcomes of an influencer’s collaboration that may help to determine return on investments.
Bywire collects online data. We analyse this using artificial intelligence, machine learning as well as humans for the trickier bits. During this period, we collected around 1.64k posts which received 625 engagements, which is an average of just over one engagement every three posts.
Firstly, if we take a look at the total volume of mentions between May 29th, 2022, and June 29th, 2022, (Buterin tweeted on Monday June 27th) we can see a distinct uptick on the day of Buterin’s tweet, with the increase in volume still present for days later.
The next area to consider is the sentiment of the posts. Are people more positive or negative? Overall, as you can see from the graph below, the posts are far more positive than negative. To have the greatest confidence in sentiment data we like to see a low neutral score and a big distinction between positive and negative. Both factors are present in this data set: negative: 7.1%, neutral: 48.7%, positive: 44.2%.
The big green area represents all the positive posts, red negative, and grey neutral.
Here’s an example of the three different kinds of posts we might get:
- Negative:
EOS is Ethereum On Steroids.
— vitalik.eth (@VitalikButerin) June 27, 2022
The name reflects the fact that the core team learned from Ethereum's amateurish naivety and idealism, and built out a team of professional top-talent software developers that created a smart contract platform with much higher scalability and speed. - Neutral:
It's time for @laurashin to finally interview @BigBeardSamurai and @BlockchainZack from the @EosNFoundation on the new #EOS and #EOSIO .
— cmadh brrrrrrr (@cmadh_) June 27, 2022 - Positive:
The reserve value we all have is time. Lucky people have better tools to use with their time, but WEB3 is going to close this gap. Empowering many to build their own liquidity is the key. #HuFi proving that it can be done through deploying code on #EOS we can all use. #MyvoteEOS pic.twitter.com/63Oq3PTUIu
— EOS PGL.MLT BP (@EOSPGLMLT_BP) June 27, 2022
If we change our metric from volume to post visibility, we start to see a slightly different picture.
A second peak occurs on Thursday, June 30th. This is evidence of online news organisations covering the story. This is reinforced when we examine the data channels:
The first peak is almost all Twitter data, but the green area in the second peak represents online news coverage and the yellow area forums, which is largely made up of posts from Reddit.
It is clear to see from the data that the tweet from Buterin has given EOS a significant boost in brand awareness and media coverage. Better still, despite his sarcasm, the coverage is largely positive in sentiment with joy representing 73% of the emotional responses (sadness 22.2%, fear 2.5%, anger 2.1%).
On the day of the tweet itself, the hashtag #eos increased in volume by 591% compared to the average over the previous 28 days. This is clearly a significant increase and a big win for the EOS community.
Another area to consider is who influenced this conversation the most from within the EOS community. We can do this by understanding which influencers provided the most volume to the conversation via their total engagements.
The top eight influencers by visibility:
- EOS Go (3.12k)
- bbackmal (2.84k)
- Bywire News (2.84k)
- alfredodecandi1 (2.8k)
- bigbeardsamurai (2.77k)
- trim_bot (2.23k)
- bcscalingscout1 (1.86k)
- eosnfoundation (1.69k)
Finally, of the 6,480 likes, 1,021 retweets and 620 quote tweets that were accrued from Buterin’s tweet, we were able to identify a unique human audience pool of around 1639 members. From this pool, we segmented the members into five unique audience groups:
- The young, open, and excitable (34.78%)
- The “show me the money” types (19.77%)
- The EOSists – they love EOS and maybe pain. (13.06%)
- Old Ripple is still a ripple (10.62%)
- Proton: I was never given a name Nakamoto! (2.56%)
- The rest? Well done, you have successfully fooled our attempts to know you, or you are just unique!
There are some commonalities between audiences which we can shortcut here.
- The majority are men (83.46%, 16.5%)
- Most are consistently based in the USA (24.91%), UK (8.66%), and India (4.69%)
- However, London is the most popular city (5.95%)
- Everyone loves Elon Musk (57.35%)
Collectively the audience personality is analytical, particular, and explosive. They also tend to share the following characteristics.
- Philosophical: They are open to and intrigued by new ideas with the will to explore them.
- Authority-challenging: Prefer to challenge authority and traditional values in order to bring about positive changes.
- Assertive: Tend to speak up and take charge of situations and are comfortable leading.
They are also 29.75 times more likely to use Reddit and 22.33 times more likely to use Telegram than the public.
Influencers are clearly a way to achieve instant brand awareness growth, especially when the influencer is admired by the target audience. Persuading them to put their reputation on the line and support your brand can be challenging. However, as this story shows, even when they are attempting to be sarcastic, they can sometimes be an enormous help.
Buterin may have thought he was heaping scorn on EOS. However, in doing so he misjudged the nature of EOS. The reality of today is very different from the laughingstock EOS became under B1. By trying to mock EOS he prompted people to take a look at it for themselves. As the social media stats show, they seem to have liked what they saw.
(Writing and research by Michael O’Sullivan, editing by Tom Cropper.)