MANILA, Philippines — A social listening report revealed on Monday that Lent-related posts have trended on social media among Filipinos this Lenten Season.
The report from Capstone-Intel found that a majority, or six out of 10 Filipino Facebook users, visited the Facebook pages of Catholic Churches to watch livestreams of Masses during the Lenten season.
There were 4,556 posts related to the word “Lent,” which generated an engagement score of 976,318.7 and yielded over 4,996,295 reactions, the report added.
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“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 read.
Capstone-Intel explained that “Facebook love” reactions account for 64.7 percent of the total reactions, with 3,234,315.
This is followed by “Facebook like” with 1,757,769 reactions at 35.2 percent, “Facebook sad” with 1,631 reactions, “Facebook angry” with 962 reactions, “Facebook haha” with 851 reactions, 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,” the report continued.
It further said that 37.7 percent of interaction shares about the topic originated from “Quiapo Lent Masses” and “Lenten Devotions,” accounting for 7.2 percent of interaction shares, which, according to Capstone-Intel, social media users also discuss Masses in Quiapo and Lenten devotions in addition to discussing the keyword “Lent.”
Capstone-Intel also revealed in its report, which monitored Lent-related posts from February 14 to March 22 of this year, that “Lent” received 100 percent positive mentions which indicates that all references to the religious observance were positive in tone.
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“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,” it said.
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Most posts related to “Lent” came from Facebook at 47.8 percent, followed by TikTok at 22 percent, and X (formerly Twitter) with 17.8 percent of topic mentions.
The Philippine Statistics Authority (PSA) previously said that in 2020, over 85.6 million or 78.8 percent of Filipinos identified as Roman Catholic.