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Who Are The UK Euphoria Social Fandom?

Kim · Mar 11, 2022 · Leave a Comment

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.

Fez – “do you think other people will find me handsome?”
Me #Euphoria pic.twitter.com/bpXx9ofNqg

— Holl (@Holliescott19x) February 21, 2022

lexi single handedly humiliated the fuck out of nate and got him to break up with cassie. she is that bitch #euphoria pic.twitter.com/m8Jlax9z3j

— jules apologist🧣 (@omotitty) February 21, 2022

So they give Elliot a fricking gig half way through but don’t show the Mandy & Cassie fight, doesn’t explain the fact Rue still owes a human trafficker 10k, the disappearance of McKay or what was in fez’s letter to Lexie.
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE! 😭 #Euphoria pic.twitter.com/3iRG8f72u6

— Linzi-Louise (@louise_linzi) February 28, 2022

the two types of friend #Euphoria pic.twitter.com/c1RSJ0v2pB

— your mom (@uglywh0re6969) February 28, 2022

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!

How to really connect with your audience in the age of ‘Peak TV’

Kim · Jun 2, 2017 · Leave a Comment

Earlier this year, I gave a quick talk at the TV Connect conference about how you can use social media to get right to the heart of your viewer base, even in the age of peak TV.

Below is an embed of the deck and a shortened version of my speaker notes.

So first a bit of background. What is peak tv? Put simply; it’s just that there are too many shows.

According to Research, 455 original scripted programs aired on American television in 2016, that’s up from 210 shows in 2009. A massive increase. Now I realise we’re in the UK, but with global release dates becoming more common, access to Netflix and on-demand programming, alongside satellite and cable, we’re in a very similar situation. There’s ‘too much’ great stuff out there.

I don’t know how much you guys know about fandom, so I’ll explain a little.

Fandom has been around for a long time. It’s not new. Fun fact, loads of the fandom vernacular (shipping for example) actually originates from the first Star Trek series.

Fandom essentially means anything that fans create around the thing they love, and the fans themselves. E.g Comicon is all about fandom.

Tumblr, a slightly lesser know social/blogging network is the home to all things fandom.

The takeaway here for social TV is that the fandom itself LOVES the show we’re trying to market. They’re overwhelmingly positive about it.

So, how do you find out about what your fandom are into? (click for gif)

Always start with Tumblr

Fandometrics is a weekly updated part of Tumblr that ranks all the different fandoms on Tumblr by subject. It is an invaluable research tool for Social TV with any kind of millennial/Z fanbase.

My strategies always start with talking to the fandom. Identifying these guys is like finding the biggest built in advocates for your show. So I start with them and then the social influencer and bloggers start to pay attention, and from there you can reach the mainstream.

Back to Doctor who again. While I was writing the strategy for the Mission Dalek campaign, I felt it was really important to understand the implications of the different types of audience who were fans of shows on different platforms. For example, when looking at the best way to connect with Dr Who fans on Instagram I identified a huge community of girls who cosplay as the various female assistants. I decided to leverage this as a way to get the often overlooked younger female Whovians involved in our competition, by allowing them to enter with cosplay images.

The US broadcaster CW knows this better than anyone else. Social TV champions from the get-go, they figured out which shows had the biggest audiences on which platforms and prioritised content there way back in 2014. Reign was all about Pinterest due to the costumes; Supernatural has always ruled Tumblr and the then new ‘The Flash’ was fast becoming a YouTube sensation.

Understanding which of your fans are on which platforms and the content that resonates on that platform will help you more than anything else when it comes to engagement planning.

And so to my final, and most important point.

When social first started, way back a decade ago, building communities was the whole point of Twitter. Then marketing came and suddenly it was a place just to advertise. Community was out of the proverbial window.

Well, the one sure-fire secret to really engaging with your fans in the age of peak TV, is to hire a great community manager.

A community manager is like a social media manager ‘plus’ They are tasked not just with publishing updates and responding to enquiries, but actively being involved in, and growing the community that they’re looking after.

I was writing the social strategy for E4 a couple of years back, and to test my hypothesis I took on community management duties for one week.

During that time e4 were airing Supernatural but weren’t really aware of the huge fandom around it. I created a strategy to truly engage with the fans by doing things like:

  • Creating content that would resonate with them
  • Speaking in their language ‘shipping terms etc.’
  • Live tweeting key moments of the shows

This resulted in not just an outpouring of love for e4 from fans during the week, but also with metrics.

The week leading up to my community management, there had been a paid campaign running, I won’t disclose how much, but it was a not insignificant amount of money. This achieved 572k impressions.

The week I took over, organically, we achieved almost 750 thousand impressions.

Which just goes to show what a combination of a good social strategy and a good community manager who knows your content can do.

Social Media and Social TV are not the Same Thing!

Kim · Jun 23, 2015 · Leave a Comment

Okay, maybe that title was a little misleading, in that social media is definitely an intrinsic part of social tv as it provides the tools that make it possible.

What I’m really trying to do in this post is point out that the two things, although sounding the same, require very different approaches. 

Which is why I’ve come up with 4 principles for you to consider, when approaching a social TV project.

Social media for both brands and broadcasters, is an often awkward, slightly perplexing idea.

Yes, you need to be visible on it, yes you need to be creating some form of content as part of this deal, and yes you need to be listening and responding to your consumers. But this is where the similarities end, for one simple reason*

People are already fans of TV shows!

Nerd Rage gif from 30 Rock

They’re interested in the stories you have to tell, they’re interested in the secrets you can share, they’re interested in the exclusives you can dangle in front of them as your will decides.

With brands, people are largely interested in getting stuff for free and customer service, unless you’re lucky enough/smart enough to have built a really strong content offering, solidly over time then getting them to stay interested in your content in 2015, is pretty hard work.

So, it makes sense that you would go about developing your social media strategy for a broadcaster, quite differently than you would for a brand.

When it comes social TV, it really is all about the fandom.

Fandom is something that brands rarely have unless they’re very, very good with Tumblr (I’m looking at you Dennys)

The key to creating a good social TV strategy is understanding the fandom. Only then can you create the kind of content that fans will go crazy for.

This sounds obvious, but time and experience have taught me that it’s really not.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying you need to love the shows, but you need to understand the fandom.

In every social TV project that I’ve worked on, I’ve started with the fandom and worked my way outwards to the mainstream.

Starting with the mainstream is never going to work, because those guys aren’t going to be bothered about your show unless it’s popular right now.

Fandom is what makes the show popular, it’s what buys the shirts and the boxsets and creates the art and goes to Comicon and gets the people on Facebook interested in watching in the first place.

Not all platforms are created equal

Yes, this goes for regular social too, but (kings of social TV, The CW will tell you) it’s more pronounced with TV.  (Or as I like to put it, don’t try Superwholock on Facebook.)

Different types of people naturally gravitate towards certain platforms. Always, always look at your analytics and then use them to hone your hunches.

Different platforms require different content types and different timings. Are you looking to build buzz, drive to TX or drive to catch up? Each of these things will benefit from understanding the whens are wheres and whos.

Also, people are beginning to make noise about Snapchat being the future of social TV, so you might want to keep an eye on that.

Oh, and always check fandometrics.

Everyone loves a reaction gif.

Seriously.

If you want to know more about any of this/are looking for some help with social TV, then please drop me a line.

*Yes, I know there are exceptions to this rule, but they are just that, exceptions.

How Broad City’s social media strategy delivers, as well as being MASSIVELY FUN

Kim · Mar 12, 2015 · Leave a Comment

It’s probably not a big secret that I’m a huge TV nerd, and as such I love Social TV. What I’m constantly astounded by, is how little thought and effort is put into most TV show social strategies. Sure, Doctor Who and Supernatural do some stuff, but in all honestly – most of this is fuelled by fandom, not smart, creative thinking.

Enter Broad City.

Until I researched this piece, I had no idea that the creators and stars Abbi and Ilana worked in SEO/social pre web-series, but suddenly all became clear.

As the second season of Broad City launched on Comedy Central in the US, it was obvious that the girls had upped their game. Their Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr presence was top notch, but not satisfied with that they decided to hit dark social as well, creating their own keyboard app, so you could now share your fave Abbi and Ilana gifs with your BFF in texts.

They partnered with Lyft and created a Broad City bus (that featured a replica of Abbi’s apartment) and drove it around picking up customers, who then Instagrammed it like crazy. (hashtags front and centre)

But the real genius was in the way the show was aware of which moments in each episode people were going to want to share. These were the ones they created gifs and stickers from and served up in their keyboard app. This was updated weekly, after each new episode with content that had just aired.

They also created in show moments that referenced online content – who can forget the al dente dentist or the glorious Body By Trey dot Biz?

Don’t get me wrong, these ladies were a content marketing machine, throughout the 10 episode run all of the owned channels posted regularly, but it didn’t ever get annoying, even if you followed them on everything. Reasons being

1) The tone of voice was always totally on point.

This isn’t a brands saying BAE type situation. Abbi and Ilana can talk like millennials, because they are millennials.

2) Catchphrases that are good hashtags.

There was no attempt to keep jokes running longer than they needed to. These girls (and their marketing team) understand that Twitter is all about the now so each episode would feature at least a couple of super hashtaggable moments, just ripe for the tweeting.

3) Their approach was integrated perfectly, but they kept their channel content separate.

Gifs and longtail content goes on Tumblr, videos are uploaded natively to Facebook, Twitter is perfect for gifs, memes and showing off fan art. Although the content occasionally crossed over, the strategy was clear and it worked. None of it felt like an marketing ploy dreamt up by a middle aged man who doesn’t get it.

Their social strategy feels less ‘put together’ than HBOs for Girls (which caters to a similar demographic), where everything feels a little bit more corporate than it should. With Broad City it all manages to feel natural and effortless. And this in turn, makes you really, really want to be their friend.

This is a perfect example of an always on social media campaign with well thought out content at its core.

It’s something we should all aim for.

Oh, and check this out for some of the best Broad City social moments.

© 2023 Kim Townend

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