Social Media Urges Us To Sell as Bitcoin Plunges To $54,000: Buy or Sell Signal?

Data shows users on social media have been encouraging each other to sell Bitcoin following its latest drop, an indication of contrarian trading activity that may have taken place behind this movement.
Bitcoin Sentiment On Social Media Has Shifted Sharply According to data compiled from analytics firm Santiment, sentiment on social media has reached historical lows during this market pullback. An indicator of interest here is “Social Volume,” which measures the degree of discussion around specific terms or topics on popular social networks like Twitter or Facebook.

Related Reading Social Volume isn’t simply counting mentions because this doesn’t give any insight into whether a trend is being followed across social media as a whole.
Sometimes mentions for a topic may be high but are limited to niche circles (that is, within several posts). As such, Social Volume wouldn’t increase as quickly unless more users across platforms began posting about that term.
Here, the analytics firm has applied terms associated with sentiment analysis to Social Volume to distinguish between discussions related to positive and negative sentiments.
Here is the chart by Santiment that depicts how Social Volume for negative and positive sentiment has evolved alongside recent Bitcoin volatility: Itemised here by Santiment on X. Both metrics appear to have seen notable increases over the last day | Source: Santiment on X
As part of its methodology for measuring sentiment analysis, an analytics firm has adopted terms such as buy bottom and bullish to indicate positive sentiment while selling top bearish for negative ones.
From the graph, it can be seen that Social Volume for bearish keywords experienced a dramatic surge alongside Bitcoin’s decrease. This could suggest an abundance of bearish posts have surfaced online.
This indicator has also seen spikes for words associated with positive sentiment; however, their spike is much smaller in magnitude compared to bearish terms. Furthermore, recent calls made between sell and buy has actually reached record numbers this year!
Therefore, social media users as a whole appear to have developed fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD) towards Bitcoin. While this might initially appear negative for its price movement, history shows otherwise; often Bitcoin’s prices move in an unexpected way to what people anticipate.

As illustrated in the chart, buying calls had increased following price drops in recent weeks; however, such optimism only resulted in further losses for assets such as bitcoin.
With its latest crash, sentiment appears to have finally reversed itself with some Bitcoin traders giving up and looking elsewhere for opportunities. “For bold traders looking for opportunities in such times,” notes Santiment, “this may present them an opportunity to act against crowd sentiment by investing against it. BTC Price might experience significant movements as this timeframe rolls forward.”
Bitcoin briefly dropped below $54,000 during its recent decline, before recovering to $55,400 after experiencing an upswing. Although, since that point it appears as though price has seen a downward trend. | Source: BTCUSD on TradingView.
Image from Dall-E, Santiment.net; chart from TradingView.com