Social Media Trending Analysis: Walker vs. DeanCasWedding
Social Media Metrics for Duke 1x05
Now that it’s the next day after the premiere of Duke, the fifth episode of the first season of Walker, I wanted to share the insights I found. Last night #Walker trended to #3 at United States Twitter Trending Top 30. During the course of the evening the show accumulated an excess of 12.3K, some additional hash-tags that trended during the course of the live tweeting included: #SendLoveToTexas and #Micki.
It’s come to my attention that during the live tweeting a Destiel fan posted some information concerning the social media analysis which directly compared the #DeanCasWedding to #Walker. I will share the tweet for ease of reference.
As you can see there are a number of issues with this data/cross analysis. I’ll begin to go through them point by point and then do a cross comparison of the two campaigns side by side.
First and foremost you will see from the tweet in question that the poster did a 7-Day analysis between #Walker and #DeanCasWedding. This means that during the time #Walker was trending they completed a report that ran from 2/12-2/18. For those who are unaware #DeanCasWedding trended on 2/14, and Walker airs regularly on Thursdays. The past two Thursdays were 2/11 and 2/18. The poster is comparing a 7 Day analysis of a hash-tag to one that surges on Thursday during a live-tweet. The author is comparing apples to oranges.
Secondly, Nielsen and Networks, don’t care about 7 Day reports and trends unless they are news programs or soap operas who have content being shared with public audiences every day or every week. There is no reason for them to monitor chatter in this way. Additionally Nielsen does not care about anything outside of the 7 hour airing window of the show in question. For example if you want your tweets to count towards the network/show and Nielsen’s top tweeted shows and your show of preference airs at 8 PM, only tweets from 5 PM - 12 AM will count towards the shows social media presence. Networks and content providers don’t care about anything outside of those hours. Which again shows how meaningless a 7-Day report is for social media concerning television series, and why I won’t track hash-tags outside of the day/time it trends.
Now that those quick details have been addressed, I’m going to do a side-by-side analysis of the two hash-tags when they trended on the dates in question #DeanCasWedding on 2/14 and #Walker during the live tweet of 2/18. For those who are interested in seeing my original report on the DeanCasWedding trend data it’s here for reference.
#DeanCasWedding
As shared before this is the most important data from the #DeanCasWedding. It trended on Twitter’s United States Trending Top 30 at #4 on 2/14, and generated a collective 46.3K tweets before it stopped trending at around 10-11PM EST. As mentioned before this campaign had a very high retweet threshold 67%, and a very high portion of the contributors had accounts that have been active for less than 1 year (26%), this is a high indication of sock puppet accounts/fake accounts. The average Destiel fan account tweeted 5-8 times on average to make the hash tag trend over the course of the 10-11 hours, with some of the top contributors tweeting an excess of 400 times. All this is provided in the report shared earlier.
What does that mean? I want to zero in on the contributors column and the reach, because this is the heart of it all. Although they had 5.3k people contribute to their campaign the conversation was very insular, that means that the people tweeting likely had the same audience, same followership, and in general the same handles talking back and forth in a very small pool of people trading comments between one another. I will do a comparison to #Walker’s premiere later on because it’s the only other campaign I have record of that had a similar tweet threshold and trended for around the same time (During it’s premiere #Walker and #Jared Padalecki trended for 15 hours, peaked at #4 on Twitter’s Top 30, and generated 59.6K tweets).
The bottom line here is that even though #DeanCasWedding was able to trend the substance is not meaningful due to the factors of reach, retweeting non-original content and sock accounts polluting the tag with what networks really value which is eye-balls reaching the tag and new people either learning or engaging with show/content.
#Walker (1x05, “Duke”)
Looking at the data side by side, you will begin to notice a few differences. Some are intuitive. #DeanCasWedding had more tweets 43.6k to Walker’s Duke 12.3k, and as such they had more tweets and contributors. This makes sense, the hash tag trended longer, and Duke is in episode 5. However look at the reach between each of these campaigns.
Duke’s Walker was able to reach 6.5 Million people, compared to DeanCasWedding’s 3 Million. Again this 12.3K+ tweet hash tag that trended for a handful of hours when the episode aired, was able to out reach a hashtag that trended for 10-11 hours on a Sunday with less competition, and on a day where people have more disposable time. This was also in light of Texas going through a major power outage, and understandable concern in addition to more topics taking light away from Walker (understandably and rightly so I may add).
What this shows is that the individuals who are contributing to the Walker hash tag are diversified, meaning they have different account followings, different accounts who are live tweeting, and that the reach of these individuals is beyond that of Supernatural, and that they are engaging with more people overall. Even though Walker had ~30K less tweets than #DeanCasWedding the economical value of this hash tag is greater because of the reach, and the fact that the contributors are truly diverse from each other (i.e. they are all not retweeting and retargeting towards the same audiences, and double dipping and speaking with the same accounts).
This can be seen in the number of original tweets created during each campaign. Walker’s Duke had 6.2K original tweets for a 12.3K hash tag, while DeanCasWedding had 13.7K original tweets for a 46.3K hash tag.
Here is another interesting factor, the age of the twitter accounts who participated in this hash tag are lower than the DeanCasWedding one, showing the likelihood for less fake accounts. Walker has 18% of these newer accounts, while DeanCasWedding has 26%. Again why does a Destiel have so many users with less than 1 year accounts when the ship has existed for 13 years?
Conclusion
What’s my point with this? Just because something has a high tweet count doesn’t mean it’s actually valuable as a social media campaign. It’s more important to go deeper into the data and understand who is interacting and how they are interacting. The number of tweets is just a small portion of a larger picture.
I’m going to make my last point here because I know the Extreme Destiel fans are children and they will likely only look at the contributors column and boast how they have more people tweet over their campaign (ignoring the fact that it took them weeks for several of the content creators to prepare for the date in question, and that they jumped on the fandom wagon from Samantha and Chad with the Roadhouse AU twitter roleplay), and so I want to dispel the notion here by sharing the Walker Premiere data.
Walker Premiere
As mentioned above the Walker premiere trended for 15 hours on January 21st, peaked at #4 on the Twitter Trending Top 30, and generated 59.6K tweets. As you can see here the total contributors for the premiere far out scale and outweigh any numbers of the Destiel fan made wedding, and ultimately this is the reason why I don’t think any of their smear campaigns, jealousy and angry tweeting matter. The economic value of Walker is more than 7 times greater than the value of Destiel.
When you compare similar scaling trends it’s clear #Walker is way bigger than Destiel is. 9.2K contributors, 5k individuals creating original content during the premiere, a retweet rate of 3-4, and wait for the K.O.
Look at that reach. 102 Million for Walker vs. 3 Million for Destiel. To further add salt to the wound:
Minimal to no bot accounts.
#micdrop
And the Destiel hellers have been planning for weeks to hashtag the fuck out of the lol Dean Cas fake wedding that included content creators and campaigns. The Walker fandom wasn’t planning any hashtag campaigns and just were live tweeting the day of, that’s much more organic, diverse, and as you said, more far reaching and influential.
























