United Airlines has seen a largely negative reaction on social media after footage surrounding a man being dragged from one of its planes went viral on Monday.

Mentions soared

United was recently embroiled in a storm of negative tweets after a passenger tweeted comments about passengers being blocked from boarding a plane because of their attire (you can read about that here), however, the reaction to the removed passenger has been far more significant.

On 26th March, when “LeggingsGate” saw United Airlines hitting the headlines, we tracked around 135k mentions of the brand in one day across Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. On the 10th of April, as the footage circulated around the internet, the brand was mentioned over 1.5 million times. Comparing the two peaks (#leggingsgate on 26th March and April 10th’s spike), there were around 1000% more mentions.

If you want an idea of what those comments contained, we took a look at sentiment-categorized mentions.

United had enjoyed a couple of days with an overwhelmingly positive sentiment – April 8th and 9th saw more than 91% of all sentiment-categorized mentions register as positive. The positivity stemmed from a tweet where United offered a free flight to the individual currently seeking 18 million retweets to get Wendy’s chicken nuggets free for a year.

However, the 10th April saw 69% of mentions categorized as negative, driven by the story surrounding the passenger being removed from the plane.