On November 24th 2021, Disney+ premiered their fourth big Marvel original show since launch, Hawkeye. It quickly became a huge hit with Parrot Analytics citing it as achieving #1 peak demand rank globally on release.
But much of what we know about streaming shows comes from the US or global audience, I wanted to better understand firstly how popular the show was in the UK in real terms, and what the social conversation around the show was.
Hawkeye was also a mega-hit in the UK, easily achieving #1 peak demand rank. Demand for Hawkeye in the UK was 33.45 times the demand for the average show across the month of December 2021. Only 0.2% of all TV shows in the market have this level of demand.
Here I’ve looked specifically at the conversation about Hawkeye that originated in the UK and was published on Twitter throughout the show’s 6 episode run.
Although the UK conversation pales in comparison to the US conversation in terms of numbers, we can still learn plenty from this data.
This was a high number of original posts vs engagements, and although the sentiment was largely neutral, the emotion most identified in the posts was ‘joy’ (according to IBM Watson).
What People Talked About
When analysing the data for mentions of various key characters, it became clear that although Clint Barton is the protagonist, it’s really the Kate Bishop show as far as the social conversation goes. Also worth noting that although Yelena didn’t even show up until the end of Episode 4, so her character was arguably the most popular.
Clint himself only achieved a few more mentions than Kingpin who only appeared in 2 episodes.
And then looking at the actors who were mentioned in our search, we see the same story reflected. Hailee Steinfeld dominated the mentions with just under 40% of the conversation. Florence Pugh came in second with just over 30%.
These two actresses stole the show
When People Talked
The majority of the posts were published on Wednesdays (when the new episodes dropped) with the highest frequency of posts between 9-10am suggesting that the hardcore fanbase were watching the show as soon as they got up. There was another peak around lunchtime and one more between 9-11pm.
Almost all of the posts were concentrated around Wednesdays, which shows that the Disney ‘episode a week’ formula is working to create a sustained and focused social conversation (rather than Netflix’s all at once drop where we typically see 3-5 days of intense activity and then the social conversation drops off).
Notably, the most popular content was from fans and was Marvel fandom specific and this received higher engagement than the MarvelUK /Disney+UK official content
Who Was Doing The Talking
Given that this is a Marvel show we would usually assume that the social audience is going to be predominantly male, but it’s also a Marvel show with more powerful female characters than most. As we can see from the reporting above, both Kate and Yelena and the actors who portrayed them are mentioned over twice as many times as anyone else. This didn’t change the fact that almost 70% of the Twitter conversation came from male-identifying accounts.
Looking at the social networks that this audience is most likely to use we can ascertain immediately that they are very online.
They are over 11 times more likely than the UK baseline to be using Twitch. These are not Instagram people.
Who The Audience Clusters Were
More interesting still is that the largest interest-based community clusters in the UK are not comics people at all. They listen to Radio 1 and watch ‘I’m a Celebrity’. These folks make up over 20% of the UK conversation, the second-largest cluster (8%) are also mainstream but instead in a ‘Channel 4 News’ watching, Guardian-reading kind of way.
In fact, it’s not until we get into the smaller clusters (between 4-6% of the conversation) that we see the comics nerds and very online people begin to emerge. Here we find clusters of Twitch streamers, Gaymers and drag fans, genre fans, and ‘serious’ film fanatics.
The common denominator between all of these groups (besides Hawkeye) is that they were all using the #SpidermanNoWayHome hashtag, this indicates that these are invested MCU fans and not random people coming to the show because they are fans of the actors.
When we look at who the whole audience is following on Twitter, this hypothesis is proven correct.
Takeaways
We’ve long known (due to staggering box office numbers) that Marvel movies are no longer the province of the old Marvel comics fanboys (and girls!) but we can see that this is now also reflected in the social conversation in the UK.
Although the show was ostensibly about Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, Kate Bishop and Yelena Belova dominated the character conversation
The conversation in the UK happens as viewers are watching the episodes during the Wednesday drops.
The audience although very mainstream are incredibly online and favour Twitch and Reddit as their social platforms of choice
Want to Find Out More?
If you’re interested in investigating a topic or audience on social media, or applying these insights to create a data-based social strategy then please…
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