Social Listening Insights into Hangover Remedies

Using Social Listening Data to Understand Movement and Growth Within Hangover Cures

Like the rest of the world, the Infegy Research Team occasionally overdoes a night out. In anticipation of the next time we experience regret in the form of a pounding headache or upset stomach, we decided to listen to hundreds of thousands of social media users’ hangover cure advice collected across dozens of platforms.

We’ve written about changing drinking habits regarding Gen Z’s aversion to alcohol. This time, we’ll examine how people who imbibe too much try to make themselves feel better. This generalized analysis is a perfect use case for a robust social listening tool like Infegy Starscape, which collects, aggregates, and analyzes broad swaths of consumer thoughts about everyday or niche topics. We organized their findings using two of Infegy’s AI tools - Infegy Starscape’s Narratives and our new Generative AI Summary widget to make those insights readable and digestible. Let’s dive through the dataset and our findings to give you tips on how to lessen the damage from your next night out.

Overview of Hangover-Related Generative AI Summary

To conduct our analysis, we first ran a very general query looking for posts across all our channels that mentioned the word “hangover” along with the word “cure” over the last five years. Broad queries are our standard initial practice, especially when conducting general research around a broad topic. With social data, we find that often, if you start out too specific, you’ll filter out many interesting stories you didn’t know existed. Next, we used our new generative AI widget to summarize our query’s dataset and point us in the right direction for the rest of our research.

Our AI systems summarized a few key points of interest, with much of the topics centered around greasy breakfast, a time-based analysis around when people talked about their hangovers, and surging post volume around IV therapies, signifying a possible burgeoning trend. Let’s now dive (briefly) into each area of analysis.

Insight 1: Resiliency of Brunch

Referring to our narratives cluster (Figure 1) and our generative AI summary (Figure 2), you’ll see that breakfast/brunch was the central theme of how social media users discussed managing their hangovers. In fact, “brunch,” or breakfast in general, was the one central narrative cluster. The strength of brunch appears to be part of a more significant trend, with Axios reporting in January that breakfast would be the “hot meal of 2024.” To understand better how brunch related to hangovers, we applied an additional AND operator to our query builder and looked for just brunch-related discussions within the overall hangover conversation.

We first looked at emotions. We got some startling results. We found near-universally positive sentiment, with the top emotions being Joy, Trust, and Love. Joy made up more than 33% of all brunch + hangover-related posts, a pretty surprising percentage. Keep in mind that hangovers aren’t particularly pleasant. They can involve intense headaches, nausea, and dehydration. Let’s dive into the aggregated hashtags to understand better what’s making people joyful.

Figure 4 gives us our answer. We found a high concentration of #hairofdog, #bloodymary, #mimosas, and #boozybrunch-related posts along with our more general food conversation, which we were expecting (#eggs, #vegan, #yum). It appears the broader/general internet isn’t necessarily “curing” their hangover but rather delaying their inevitable suffering for as long as possible. While amusing, this “wisdom of crowds” is common within social listening analysis. For example, we found all sorts of off-label usage drug usage when researching our ebook on social listening for pharmaceuticals. In short, social listening data gives you what potential customers are doing, not what they’d tell you they were doing if you asked in person.

To read the entire insight brief, please visit our website!