New data compiled via TikTok has found that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are by far the most talked-about royal couple – but it is not all good news.
Prince Harry and Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, have been dealt a crushing blow in new figures pitting them against the Prince and Princess of Wales.
The couple recently became two of the most talked about figures on the social media platform TikTok, where videos covering them as a subject have racked up millions of views.
TikTokers have pitted the couples against one another, with tens of thousands of posts seeing people pick sides in heated debates on the Royal Family.
The figures showed that the Duke and Duchess of Sussex are by far the most talked about of the four, with billions of views on posts where they were the subject.
But that popularity is not all good, with Eileen Kwok, a social marketing specialist at Hootsuite who helped compile the research alongside Newsweek, noting that people are “highly critical” of the American royals’ relationship.
On TikTok, the number of posts over a 30-day period regarding the royals was nearly neck-and-neck for both couples, with 6,000 for the Duke and Duchess and Prince William and 5,000 for the Princess of Wales.
TikTokers posted 140,000 times about Prince Harry, and these posts received 13 billion views, with Duchess Meghan close behind on 115,000 and 11 billion views.
While they lead the UK-based Prince and Princess of Wales – who managed 79,000 and 65,000 posts and 11 billion and 10 billion views respectively – the discussion around them was, on average, more negative.
Ms Kwok said that terms associated with Princess Kate were “tennis”, “rude”, “paparazzi”, and “coronation”, while Meghan Markle was associated with “divorce”, “Prince Harry”, “being rude”, “narcissistic”, and “awkward”.
Ultimately, she said, the data shows the TikTok crowds are “searching for negative behaviour”, which bodes poorly for the couple with the most active searches.
