Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

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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…

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Why you should be using social media listening

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When brands first started using social media, few even had defined strategies. We were all figuring this new strange beast out. Not everyone was here yet, there were no algorithms, we were actually interested in the content that was being shared.

Fast forward to 2020 and it’s a very, very different space. By next year it is predicted there will be 3.1 billion social media users globally. Everyone is here, and they are all talking.

When brands create content for social media, they’re not just competing with other brands, they’re competing with memes, and pictures of dogs and whatever is trending on TikTok today.

A social media strategy helps with getting your content in front of eyeballs, (it’s imperative if you actually want to social media to perform for your brand). But how can you be sure that your social media strategy is actually going to deliver?

The answer is social media listening

Social media listening is simply the practice of using some kind of software (I favour Pulsar and consider it best in class) to listen around keywords/brand names across a variety of social channels.

Why is it so useful? I’ve broken it down into 3 sections below.

Understanding who your social audience actually are

Almost all brands have an idea of who they want to reach on social media. This is oftentimes either anecdotal or based on real life/traditional research methods. But the internet isn’t like real life. It’s like the internet. I’ve worked on so many projects where the client has had a very clear idea of who their social audience is, and social listening has revealed something very different indeed.

Take Sherlock for example. When I was approached to write the digital strategy for the Sherlock immersive escape game, the offline data said Sherlock fans were mostly male and predominently boomers.

Anecdotally this didn’t make sense to me, everything I knew about the online fandom suggested different. So I did a big chunk of social listening before the project even began. I looked for Sherlock fans and their interests and differences based on location and platform and it became incredibly clear that the Sherlock social fandom was incredibly female, and mostly under the age of 35. (Offline data was skewing more toward the literary fandom/Sherlockians)

Using data from the social listening I was able to create a strategy that played to the global audience, spoke their language, actually engaged them on platforms they were already using and drove an incredible amount of organic traffic.

Competitor research

Most people will do a social media audit of their own brand, and look at what competitor brands are doing themselves on social media. In my experience it’s uncommon for people to dedicate the time to doing social listening around key competitors, oftentimes the brand in question won’t even be doing this themselves.

This is important as it’s far easier to get a realistic idea of the general feeling about a brand by listening to what people are saying when they aren’t addressing the brand directly. (Pulsar leverages IBM Watson to actually understand the key mood of the conversation alongside the sentiment)

This can help your brand by identifying current issues with competitor products, pain points, and even understand what consumers are actually looking for (that’s right, social media listening isn’t just for marketing, R&D teams hit me up!).

You can use this data for creating a robust content strategy for any part of the funnel, or even for product development.

Identifying influencers, micro-influencers and detractors

So many brands have got influencer work so wrong, just going for the biggest name with the broadest appeal. Although this can be brilliant for reach, I tend to favour a more micro-influencer based approach. Social listening is brilliant for finding the people in your communities of interest who talk about your keywords all of the time.

The other side of this, is it’s also very easy to identify trolls in the space too. I look at the people who are talking the most around the keywords, switch the sentiment to filter to negative and then I have all the biggest detractors in any community listed out for me- ready for my community managers to keep an eye on. (This was helpful when crafting the social strategy for the Climate Assembly.)

I’m going to stop here, although I could add many more reasons that listening should be a part of your social media strategy going forward. As always, if you have any questions or would like to work together – get in touch!