Bell’s mental health fundraising initiative #BelLetsTalk nabbed the top position in Twitter’s most used hashtags of 2016 — beating out #PokemonGo (which came in sixth), #tbt (fourth) and #ElectionNight (eighth).
A related hashtag, #MentalHealth also made it into the top ten in seventh place. Directly trailing #BelLetsTalk was #Toronto and #Canada.
#BelLetsTalk is a yearly initiative held by Bell with the intention of getting people talking about mental health to remove its negative stigma. To do this, the carrier encourages its Bell and Bell Aliant customers to communicate on January 27th, 2016, donating five cents to programs dedicated to mental health for every text message sent and every wireless and long distance call made.
Let’s make talking about our #mentalhealth as easy as it is to talk about going to the dentist. #BellLetsTalk pic.twitter.com/KFkej0VbAh
— Bell Let's Talk (@Bell_LetsTalk) December 1, 2016
In other statistics released by Twitter, Canada’s most retweeted tweets were dominated by Drake and Justin Bieber in 2016 — all except the most popular, which was sent out by a relatively new user by the name of @lovelyytylerr shortly after the American election.
The user, who had only been on Twitter since May 2016, tweeted “Rt while you still can” with a screen shot of a Google search for “whos [sic] the president of the U.S.” and the result being Barack Obama. The user, who has around 1,200 followers, received over 250,000 retweets. In comparison, their current pinned tweet has 19 retweets.
https://twitter.com/lovelyytylerr/statuses/795446262657073152
Drake’s track list for Views wasn’t far behind @lovelyytylerr with almost 245,000 retweets and was followed by Justin Bieber stating “Thank you. #22” after his birthday, which received about 186,000 retweets.
In other Twitter news from 2016, Bieber became only the second user to reach 90 million followers (he is now at 90.2 million) after Katy Perry and Drake became the second Canadian musician to reach 30 million followers (the first being Justin Bieber). Up-and-coming young musician Shawn Mendes is gaining recognition with 8.08 million followers and more @ mentions than Drake.
Meanwhile, former Toronto Blue Jays outfielder Jose Bautista — @joeybats19 — became the sixth active player in MLB with more than a million followers. PK Subban, however, was the Canadian athlete that received the most mentions. Taking that position for musicians was Justin Bieber, for actors Ryan Reynolds and for digital creators YouTube star Lilly Singh.
