Homeland vs. The Walking Dead - A Social Media Battleground

Good TV shows are entertaining, addictive and engaging. Engaging in several ways. We all saw ourselves sitting on the edge of our sofas but real fans spend more time than just during the show with their favorite characters. For companies behind the scenes that is a great possibility to build a community, deliver content and engage fans in the end. This blog post looks on how the organizations behind Homeland and The Walking Dead use social media - Facebook and Twitter in this case.

Homeland and The Walking Dead are taken into consideration as both released new seasons in the beginning of October.

The Walking Dead Season 6 premiere: October 11, 2015
Homeland Season 5 premiere: October 4, 2015

We created a dashboard with different social media metrics to help understanding posting patterns and the community. As the best way to build a dashboard is to do so in a problem-oriented way, we decided for the following key questions to be answered:

• In which network the shows receive higher interactions?
• Which audience growth is higher?
• Which company seems to rely on paid posts?
• How Hashtags are used?
• Which content receives highest amount of interactions

Homeland vs. The Walking Dead - Key Facts

The zombie show The Walking Dead is more prominent than Homeland, which is notable in Facebook total fans 32 vs. 2 Million and Twitter followers 3.8m vs.175k. Analyzing post frequency of the different shows it gets clear that responsible people behind TWD are posting more often than Homeland social media team. In the analyzed period of time (22 Sept - 22 Oct 2015) TWD posted 126 posts and Homeland 81. Both are huge numbers, as the average page is posting 1.5 times per day, showing that these pages were significantly more active during the month of their latest season. On Twitter TWD sent 1024 tweets in during the last 30 days and is far above average with this number. Homeland already is tweeting more than the average account with 355 tweets. So, TWD is bigger and more prominent among consumer. Let’s get one step deeper into analysis and check how the teams are using social media.

(Feel free to share our spooky graphic - Happy Halloween)

Hashtag Detection

Looking at our Hashtags Detection, it gets clear that TWD is the winning show here. The top 5 hashtags, ranked by total interactions (on Twitter) are talking about the “zombie show”. As this metric is based on total interactions, it is normal the Homeland does not have a chance as the follower count and potential reach is significantly lower. Based on numbers, Homeland is doing a great job also, as 26k interactions is a good amount but apart from quantitative number we can learn one thing here: Use more than one, brand-related hashtag. TWD uses different hashtags to bundle discussions. The “main hashtag” #TWD achieves the highest amount of interactions (600k) but other hashtags such as #TWDSeason6 are performing still very well (152k).

Paid Posts Detection

Checking our paid post detection table we see that both companies seem to rely on supporting their posts through promoting them. In the stacked column chart our algorithm detects that Homeland is sponsoring 31.58% posts and TWD promoting 23% of its undeath content. Paid Post Detection is a very helpful metric to detect which content your competition considers as worth promoting.

Interactions & Audience Growth

Both shows are developing with a constant positive trend during the last months. The audience rate is comparatively similar but TWD growths at a much faster pace. At the release day both shows have high interaction and audience growth peaks. Followed by that we wanted to identify which post types receive the highest engagement. As determined in our Facebook Post Type study image posts receive higher engagement than any other post type. Homeland and TWD are posting images most frequently followed my links and videos. Videos seem to work better for Homeland as its interaction rate on posts is higher than the displayed  interaction rate from TWD.

Fun Analysis, Real Take-Aways

In every analysis we like to provide the reader of our blog with some take-aways for the own social media strategy.

1. Focus

Figure out in which network you receive more interactions and where your efforts tend to engage more of your fans. Then you should focus on that network and deliver great content in this one. Especially small businesses are not able to look after a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Pinterest account, at least not properly. So here it is better to focus on the network your brand or product is made for. Twitter and Facebook, for example seems to work for Homeland and The Walking Dead.

2. Hashtags

Using hashtags is important, using the right ones is essential. Both analyzed companies are highly successful on Facebook and Twitter, but Homeland does not use more than #homeland, which is considered to be not optimal. TWD uses seasonal hashtags for the start of the new season in different formats and content-related hashtags like #InCarolWeTrust. This is a great way to engage users. Keep that in mind while communicating hashtags. Keep using hashtags interesting for people. Especially interesting is the use of different hashtags when it makes sense to bundle topic-related. In this case a hashtag for season six can help to bundle everything related to the new season.

3. Cross Channel Promoting

First of all you should give people a benefit to follow on your other channels. Homeland realized that with tweet-campaigns from actors and cross-promoting from Facebook. This is a very efficient technique to constantly grow your audience. Campaigns like Homeland is promoting can have huge effects. Ideally it might be interesting for your fans what you are tweeting throughout the day - so tell them what you are tweeting and send them to your Twitter.