Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

Kim

Social Listening, Insight and Strategy, in that order. 9 Key Takeaways

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A social strategist’s guide for marketers, advertisers and comms experts

Earlier this year I wrote a post over on Pulsar platform explaining how social listening works, what you should be looking for and why it’s still so important.

I’ve included one of my favourite takeaways (that I wish more people understood).

4. Using listening just to monitor your brand & competitor mentions? You’re missing out on the good stuff

Many brands are still using their own mentions and competitor benchmarking as the basis for their social strategies, and although this makes for an excellent KPI, it’s a teeny tiny part of the story. Brand watching lags, but staying abreast of attitudes and behaviors helps us anticipate what’s next, stay ahead of trends, and be proactive rather than simply reactive. 

Think beyond traditional marketing plans and learn about what matters to your brand, not just what’s said about it. 

And if you’re interested you can read the whole post below, or visit Pulsar Platform for more info

Social Listening, Insight and Strategy, in that order. 9 Key Takeaways

Social Media Witches

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Want to know more about modern witches, and how they manifest on social media?

Sure you do! Take a look at this piece on Pulsar that I did the set-up and research for. It’s a real deep dive into the world of witches, their platform-specific behaviours and the themes that move them. 🧙‍♀️ We delve into the aesthetics, the rituals, and map the audience. Also, we briefly touch on mushroomcore and all the mycelium magic that goes along with it.

If you’re in the mood for some interesting social media anthropology then you should give it a read.

Witches are real, and they’re on TikTok

Who Are The UK Euphoria Social Fandom?

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Season Two of Euphoria has proved nothing short of a global phenomenon. It’s become the most tweeted about TV show of all time, and the second most-watched show in the history of HBO.

As in my last post, I’m going to use social listening to understand who is talking about the show in the UK. Most of the press coverage I’ve read has been from middle-aged journos who are exhausted/traumatised from just watching the show. A theme that started at the beginning of the first season – but who are the show’s actual fans and what do they think?

For this project, I’ve analysed the Twitter conversation using #Euphoria originating in the UK from Feb 1st until the season finalé.

I looked at 9.1k original posts, which generated 50k engagements and 23 million impressions.

This is interesting in itself, as it indicates that people are sharing and liking others’ content much more than creating their own. It also tells us that many of the fans are tweeting tens of times per week about the show. In fact, there were only 15.1k unique authors in the entire search, further enforcing the idea that this fandom shows their love through others’ creations.

Who are the Euphora fandom?

The first thing to note is that these fans are rabid. Many of them live-tweeted the show, with one fan tweeting about the show an incredible 702 times during the final month of the show being on air.

The overall audience is more than 70% female and almost 50% of them live in or around London.

This audience has no particular influencer/celebrity affinities, only 27% of them are following Zendaya and 30% Ariane Grande and these are the two most common affinities.

Here instead we are seeing at least 7 disparate groups of people who aren’t particularly connected, all talking about the show in their own way.

For example, the LGBTQA+ audience are primarily male, and they talk more about Rue than any other character, whereas the Glaswegian cluster who were 3 x as likely to be female talked more about Fez.

Other interesting findings included the discovery of a cluster of female wrestling enthusiasts (both females who wrestle themselves and fans of female wrestlers) who over-index on Twitch use. These folks are more interested in talking about Rue and Maddy than anything else.

Social listening audience analysis of the UK Euphoria Fandom

When are they online?

As we’ve seen before, the strategy of weekly episode drops is one that works particularly well for driving social conversation, as these fans tend to live tweet/next day tweet the show and then not really talk about it until the next episode. This ensures the social longevity of the conversation.

When we see shows releasing all episodes of a season at the same time (the Netflix model) we tend to see a hyper-concentrated mass of posts for 7-10 days after the initial release date, and then the conversation fades away almost entirely.

Which social platforms do they favour?

Looking at the audience as a whole we see that they over-index on using most social platforms, but that Snapchat, Spotify, Reddit and Twitch come top.

It’s interesting that Reddit is here, as I’m seeing it show up more and more in searches you wouldn’t expect it to be dominant, a testament to the ever-growing importance of Reddit as a platform.

Which characters do they like?

You might expect a huge number of the posts to mention Zendaya, considering just how popular she is right now, but only 388 original posts even mention her by name/hashtag. This compares to the almost 1k posts that talk about Rue (the character she portrays) suggests that this audience are far more interested in the characters and their stories than the actors who are playing them.

I analysed mentions of the character names over the last 5 episodes.

The first noteworthy thing is that 74% of the total posts about the show mentioned at least one character. This is a super high percentage of character posts and confirms that it’s the characters and their stories that are at the core of this show for the fans.

Rue was the fan favourite, but Fez was just behind her in terms of volume, with Cassie and Lexi following next.

When I looked specifically at the last episode, Ashtray and Fez each generated 25% of the overall conversation.

What was surprising was the lack of conversation around Nate Jacobs – for a toxic character that fans love to hate, he receives under 9% of character mentions.

Outside of the conversation around the show, I discovered that over 25% of the analysed audience were using “gorgeous gorgeous girls” regularly, and a slightly smaller number were creating content around the feminine urge. Understanding the memes that resonate with your community early on, allows you to create the right kind of content and be accepted by the fandom as you can speak the same language.

What content do they create and share?

This is a selection of the most shared and liked posts. This show is a perfect demonstration of how posts become viral. Someone with 34 followers posts content that resonates with other fans, and within a day it has over 200k likes.

Interestingly we see no official or ‘critic’ based content in the best performing content, because although these publishers have huge platforms, what they’re writing is not resonating with the fandom.

What matters to them?

I wanted to identify the core themes that came up when people talked about Euphoria. I started by looking at the keywords that were most often used by the (older) TV journos. I looked for posts that talked about it being hard to watch, and the abusive nature of the relationships, but there were so few it was negligible.

What did become apparent was that the fans of the show talk about love, and friendship and how much the show moves them (often to tears). And for a show with the tagline ‘feel something’ I would consider that a resounding success.

Takeaways

  • There appears to be a real disconnect between the fans’ and the critics’ opinions
  • Although critics may dominate the conversation in terms of impressions – their thoughts on the show are often completely misaligned with what the fans say
  • The fans exist in their own social world clusters and their only real common talking point is the show
  • Up to the minute memes are the perfect way for the fandom to communicate in real time
  • HBO understand and facilitate this by ensuring that the most memeable moments of each show are instantly available on their official Giphy channel
  • The reason for the success is that the show makes its viewers feel something. This is echoed in the social listening data. (If you’re interested, here’s a great video essay about this point)
  • HBO UK share content about their own show, but don’t seem to understand what the fans like about it/how they talk. For example, they tweeted asking people to sum up Fez and Lexi’s relationship – but don’t use any of the popular ship names that fans are using
  • Each social platform has a community who talks about Euphoria. Here we’ve looked only at Twitter, but the Instagram Euphoria community is filled with beauty influencers, the TikTok community love the fashion and to point out how unrealistic the whole thing is. This kind of information is invaluable when thinking about how to shape your social strategy

Why do these social listening insights matter?

By really understanding who your potential social audience is, what they like /what they don’t, you can create strategies that work. Your content can live in that magic social space between brand goals and audience interests. You can identify possible pain-points, influencers and detractors, and utilise these in your plan. You can understand when they’re online, who you need to advertise to and who you don’t so your paid social campaigns are more effective.

There are so many things you can learn when you undertake a social listening or audience mapping project. It’s not limited to social strategy, but I wouldn’t create a social strategy without social listening.

As always, if you’re interested in learning more about any online topic, or you want help with creating a social strategy that will resonate with the people you want to reach then please get in touch!

Marvel Studios’ Hawkeye: A Twitter Conversation Study

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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.

Headline stats for the Hawkeye search on Twitter UK from November – December 25th

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…

Get In Touch!

I Talked to Pulsar Platform About the Work That I Do

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Those of you who have read my previous posts know how highly I rate Pulsar Platform as the best way to do social listening. I talked to them earlier this year about the ways that I use their platform and how effective is has been in allowing me to craft strategies with brilliant results.

Click the image to head over to Pulsar and read the full piece.