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.

Figure 1: Narratives around hangover cures (August 2018 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

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.

Figure 2: Output from Infegy Starscape’s New Generative AI Widget (August 2018 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

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 3: Top emotions for “brunch” and “hangover cure” (August 2019 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

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.

Figure 4: Top hashtags related to “brunch” and “hangover cure” (August 2019 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

Insight 2: Analyzing Periodic Microtrends - Looking at Post Volume by Day

For our next AI-derived insight, let’s look at the distribution of posts across the days of the week and time of day. Remember, our AI-insight widget clued us into frequent posts around the weekends, specifically on Sunday. Figures 5 and 6 appear to corroborate this. We found colossal post volume increases on Saturday and Sunday, with somewhat elevated post volume on Monday. These spikes make a ton of sense, as hangovers and the demand for cures caused by drinking too much are most common over the weekends after nights of drinking.

Figure 5: Hangover Cure post distribution by day of the week (August 2018 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

This periodic post volume behavior also holds when looking at aggregate time of day. Figure 6 shows what time of day people likely post about hangover cures. Remember that Figure 6 reflects UTC as we collect global content worldwide. You’ll note diminished post volume from 0:00 through 10:00 UTC, the evening in the United States. People aren’t posting about hangovers then, as they’re usually in the process of getting one. However, post volume around hangovers and potential cures surge as time continues throughout the evening and into the morning. “Hangxiety”, the condition of being anxious over hangovers, could drive some of this timing.

Figure 6: Hangover cure post volume by time of day (August 2018 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

These microtrends allow us to predict demand for your agency’s advertising content. If you’re an agency in the restaurant or food and beverage space and want your content to resonate, it could be helpful to know when that content is most likely to resonate. If you’d like to learn more about this type of trend analysis, look at one of our recent blogs.

Insight 3: Growth of Liquid IV

Finally, let’s dive into our third mini insight from our Generative AI widget (which could be its own brief). You’ll note that our summary mentioned IV hydration therapies. With this in mind, we applied another query for Liquid IV, the leader in the space. Liquid IV promises rehydration through electrolyte replacement, something that’s key for people experiencing hangovers. We saw colossal post volume growth over the last year, much of that growth from January 2024 into the summer. News reports corroborate this post volume surge, which mention that Liquid IV might quickly become a billion-dollar business.

Figure 7: Post volume around hangover cures and Liquid IV (August 2018 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

Finally, let’s figure out how close social media users associate Liquid IV with hangovers. Figure 8 shows a topic word cloud with topics social media users use when talking about Liquid IV, colored by sentiment. Interestingly, “hungover” appears the most negative, while the Liquid IV product-related keywords appear much more positive. If you’re a brand researcher, this pattern is what you want to see - the problem is unfavorable, with your product positioned perfectly as the solution. We’ll continue to watch this space, but we expect strong continued growth associated with Liquid IV’s products.

Figure 8: Top topics around hangover cures and Liquid IV (August 2018 through August 2024); Infegy Social Dataset.

Takeaways for your brand

Investing in a social listening solution like Infegy Starscape is essential for your brand to tap into real-time consumer insights and emerging trends. By analyzing vast datasets, you can uncover authentic consumer behaviors and preferences, such as the surge in popularity of brunch as a hangover remedy or the growing trend of IV hydration therapies. These insights allow your brand to strategically position itself, tailor marketing efforts, and predict demand more accurately. Leveraging social listening data helps you stay ahead of the competition and meet your audience's needs more effectively, ensuring your brand remains relevant and responsive in a dynamic market.