Steve Jobs’ passing caused an outpouring of news, response, and emotion in the tech community and around the world. Social media became an outlet for consumers to react and reflect, as is often the case when important people leave us in this day and age.
The real-time and social nature of these mediums seems to be a natural fit for this kind of emotional discussion. Many have discussed the legacy Steve Jobs and how he affected people in business and personally. But today, we wanted to share some data that further demonstrates the amazing scope and breadth of his impact on all of us.
We used Simply Measured to capture Facebook Analytics for an index of 6 top tech blogs and analyze the media volume and consumer engagement around the headlines of Steve Jobs’ passing. The story captured a very large percentage of overall headlines for these tech blogs, but the scale of consumer response to these headlines was the most impressive data.
The rate of engagement on posts about Steve Jobs was 6 times higher than the average post in our tech blog index over the past 30 days.
The response to this news dwarfed other major tech news – including the iPhone announcement and Facebook F8. This is just a small fraction of the total response across social media, but gives an indication of the impact this story had.
Facebook Response By Topic
Looking at the topics that drew high engagement, the Steve Jobs story clearly rose to the top against other major tech news over the last month.
Response Rates Per Post
The response rate per post was staggering. Across our index of 6 pages, the average response was 407 likes and comments. This is 6 times higher than the average response to all other stories over the last month and clearly overshadowed other major tech news.
Blogs were focused on Steve Jobs
If we zoom in on the initial days following the news of Steve Jobs passing, we can see how every blog in our index was highly focused on the story. Mashable had the most posts in total with 24 in the 5 day period, but Gizmodo dedicated the highest percentage of their overall headlines to Steve Jobs.
