This time, Robinhood really missed the mark.
Robinhood ($PRIVATE:ROBINHOOD) is facing consumers' ire after yet another trading snafu that penned in all its customers on one of the biggest single-point increases in the history of the Dow. Rightly, its traders are a little peeved. And, on social media, it showed.
On Facebook ($FB), the Talking About Count affiliated with Robinhood shot up (that's the end of the line, on the far-right), hitting levels not seen since... the very last time Robinhood suffered a major outage, dating back to December 2018. That is marked by the small spike, in the middle (the very big spike, on the left, we'll get to in a bit).
One might expect that after closing a jumbo round that started pushing Robinhood toward deca-corn status, that it may have reeled in enough cash to stamp out tech troubles that would lock traders out of their accounts on big days for the market.
Despite Robinhood's best attempts to quell the social media rage, their reps could do little to calm Twitter users: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I'm out," one wrote.
Whoever said 'There's no such thing as bad publicity,' must not have been referring to social media users' intrigue when big startups suffer an embarrassing public failure. However, Robinhood is clearly getting more attention on Twitter, too, where it recorded a 9.5% follower leap as it struggled to get systems back online for its users.
When a company tacks on more than 10,000 followers virtually overnight, it's safe to say they have become a viral sensation. This time, Robinhood went viral for all the wrong reasons. And, all of its social media data reflects what can happen for a brand when it makes customers really, really happy.
Both of these charts reflect data points dating back to January 2018 that do not cover outages for Robinhood. The most substantial uptick in Twitter ($TWTR) Followers for Robinhood came in January 2018, when the trading platform announced it would add commission-free trading for cryptocurrencies.
That nearly doubled its Twitter following and helped to generate the most attention Robinhood has ever received on Facebook, as well - which gets us back to the point about the largest spike in chatter in our first graph.
About the Data:
Thinknum tracks companies using the information they post online - jobs, social and web traffic, product sales and app ratings - and creates data sets that measure factors like hiring, revenue and foot traffic. Data sets may not be fully comprehensive (they only account for what is available on the web), but they can be used to gauge performance factors like staffing and sales.