Social Media Monitoring Part 1: The Walking Dead

THE WALKING DEAD. Even if you don't watch it, you've heard of it. Based on the already popular comic book/graphic novel series, The Walking Dead (TWD) has taken America, and even the world, by storm. As of now, TWD is the world's second most popular show behind Game of Thrones. Despite TWD's smaller budget and less-well-know actors, it has dominated social media unlike any other TV drama. Compared to Throne's roughly 20 million Facebook followers, TWD comes out far strong with around 36 million followers. You can read along with the theme if you want:

Aside from being one of the most talked about and watched shows world-wide, the Walking Dead absolutely kills it in the social media game. Normally, fans of a TV show are just expected to tune in once a week. The Walking Dead keeps its fans engaged at all times. There is a concerted effort to create and maintain a perpetual groundswell. Look how active their Facebook page is. Let's pretend we're part of the TWD marketing team:

Just a friendly reminder the show's airing tomorrow... 21 thousand likes. 

Who wants to be a part of the show? Just tune in on Sunday to be part of this sweepstakes. Oh, also tell all of your friends about it

Hmmmm... people aren't talking about last week's episode so much anymore. Maybe we can give them something else to talk about. Oh! How about an art contest! 51 thousand likes.

Guys, just wanted to remind you about our art contest.

Look at how the TWD team are constantly engaging the groundswell. Only one of the four most recent posts was actually about the show. The rest were about the fans. Show us YOUR fan art. Do YOU want to be a zombie on the show? 

The way The Walking Dead engages the groundswell is genius. You know all those shows that involve fans? American Idol. So You Think You Can Dance. TWD took that concept and applied it to a TV drama. The drama genre has never engaged and involved fans as much as TWD has. They've created a feeling that fans are a part of the show, just like American Idol.

In addition to a highly active Facebook page, The Walking Dead has ANOTHER show that accompanies it (Not Fear The Walking Dead, which is a spin-off show). The Talking Dead airs immediately after every episode on the same network, AMC. Take a look:

"So, from @5Braydon on twitter: D'angelo, how do you think Negan will react when he finds out that Rick's group is planning to fight?" Again, they're making the fans a part of the show. Regardless of whether there was a Walking Dead talk show or not, people would still post about the show. However, having a show that explicitly encourages fans to post (with a chance of seeing their post on TV), doubtlessly prods the groundswell to grow. 

Given all this, do you still think The Walking Dead is lacking when it comes to engaging the groundswell? Well, here's some proof. 

This is a screenshot of the social media activity surrounding TWD from the past five years, courtesy of Google Trends. See a pattern? 
There's a reason you see double peaks/valleys resembling the "rock-on" hand sign. The walking dead airs half of a season, takes a few weeks off, and then airs the second half of their season. After the second half of the season, the show takes a much longer break before its next season. The Walking Dead gets an enormous amount of social media activity for its season premieres. The activity then drops off a little until it usually picks back up to a comparable level for the mid-season finale (which tends to be among the most dramatic moments in a season). Then, there is the mid-season break, which accounts for the steep U-shaped valley between "rock-on" emojis. Finally, social media activity is obviously weakest between seasons. 

If you go back and look at the last graph though, you'll notice an outlier. Look what happens at the far right of the graph. Whoa! That spike is almost twice as tall as any of the others!

The Walking Dead finished their sixth season with arguably one of the biggest cliffhangers in TV history (We won't go into detail. Don't worry, no spoilers). So that's one explanation for that huge spike. But that's probably too simple. 

Look at the build-up to that spike. Unlike the other seasons, the groundswell starts to stir a little bit before the season started. That's because they incessantly posted commercials and promotions like the one above. If you're a fan of the show, you probably remember seeing a promotion for the new season twice a day on your Facebook feed. 

Those promotions weren't just the same commercial every time either. They kept coming up with new clips, teasing fans who were desperate to know who met Lucille. You can't explain that enormous spike in social media activity without acknowledging that the show-runners were setting up the platform for a groundswell boom for months. 

Here's a look at the top searches in the past seven years (the same time span represented in the above graph):

See the word "Negan"? That's the guy with the scary looking baseball bat from the commercial. Notice that it's at the top of the search list. That means that a new character topped the search list even though he's only been on screen for about ten minutes. Safe to say, that cliffhanger got the groundswell pretty antsy for a new season.

The social media activity over the last seven years has been pretty consistent across all fifty states. As you can see, the whole map is pretty much the same color of blue:

The Walking Dead didn't get the same consistency worldwide, but they're probably not too upset about it:

Surprisingly, the U.S. isn't even in the top five in social media activity. So yeah, the social media activity is really strong for TWD in the States, but it isn't even their most prolific. TWD is taking over the world. 

Now that we have an idea of how TWD engages its groundswell over a long period of time, let's take a closer look at the numbers regarding how they manage their day-to-day social media activity. Here's their activity from February 21st to February 28th:

You can tell over the course of the week, social media activity is pretty calm. There are bumps everyday during peak social media hours Monday through Friday. Also unsurprisingly, you get a huge bump on Sunday (Feb. 26th) when the show airs. What is unique about The Walking Dead though, is that second peak on Monday. It's almost as high as when the show actually aired. It's almost impossible to keep people talking about a show all week. I mean, they do have lives, but to mimic social media activity the day after the show actually aired is quite impressive.

Let's take a closer look at activity throughout the week. These are snapshots from three different days of the week. One from a Thursday, one from Sunday, and one from Tuesday:

Thursday February 23rd

Remember the art contest? Artwork is one of the top search words related to TWD.

Sunday February 26th

Tuesday February 28th

OK, there's a lot of numbers to go over there. The first thing that stands out are the Sunday numbers. That snapshot was taken right after the show aired. Shouldn't we see the largest percentage for strength during the strongest social media time of the week? Social Mention defines strength as "the likelihood that your brand is being discussed on social media. A very simple calculation is used: phrase mentions within the last 24 hours divided by total possible mentions." 

It probably isn't as simple as they say. It isn't clear what is meant by "total possible mentions". Does "possible" mean the most activity the brand has ever reached? Is it an arbitrary number social mention devised? Is it weighted for that particular time? 

Unfortunately, the website doesn't answer these questions. However, it might be fair to assume that "total possible" indeed refers to the most activity a given brand has ever registered at a particular time of the week (or maybe year?). There aren't many other explanations for why peak social media hours are lower than random points in the week. 

If this is true, that means the TWD team can understand exactly how strong any one of their given episodes is. At 80%, February 26th's episode was decent, but definitely not one of the show's best. 



Another conclusion we can draw is that A LOT of people are talking about the show. The passion numbers range from 29%-32%. Clearly not much variance there (though I saw the number reach 59% at one point). Passion measures the strength of a brand's base relative to more casual followers. In other words, a high strength percentage means a lot of people post about a brand multiple times in a short time span. For The Walking Dead, there's definitely a strong base, but the high volume of social media activity drives the passion number down throughout the week because the percentage of people posting multiple times is reduced the more people post only once.

Overall, The Walking Dead has been extremely successful in engaging the groundswell. Yeah, it's a good show, but what's remarkable is how they've marketed it. There's a constant effort to keep loyal fans involved as well as to attract new fans. They even chased football fans at the Superbowl:


The Walking Dead has received criticism from fans and casual for a lot of different things. Bad acting, boring episodes, boring characters, slowing story line, the list goes on. Despite those criticisms, which have gotten plenty of shows canceled, TWD has persevered. By engaging the groundswell constantly, and in several different, creative ways, it had its biggest social media boom to date this season. Don't expect the momentum to stop here. The dead are coming.