Supernatural Gets It
How one of the largest fandoms understands the Internet better than the rest
The CW’s Supernatural recently entered its twelfth season and shows no sign of slowing down. Despite relatively low viewership — according to Nielsen, Supernatural averaged 2.75 million live + 7 viewers last season — the show continues to survive and thrive. It owes some of its success to its secret weapon: one of the largest and most devoted TV fandoms.
Entertainment properties cannot flourish these days without paying attention to fans, and that means paying attention to fandom. And the Supernatural fandom stands out even among other large online fandoms. There are many Doctor Who fans, for example, but they don’t mobilize in the same way Supernatural fans do.
So what’s their secret sauce?
An obvious place to start is demographics. Many fandoms with active and vocal online fan presences tend to be young, with a majority of members under 30, and predominantly female.
Supernatural obeys this rule. Compared to the social baseline, Supernatural over-indexes with online commenters under 24. This group is more likely to use social media, so it’s no wonder Supernatural is famously social.
The show has been able to replenish its youthful fanbase over time, which is illustrated by both the fandom’s behavior and its demographics. At Supernatural’s onset, when female fans wrote fanfiction featuring original female characters (OFCs) in the Supernatural world, these OFCs were love interests for the Winchester brothers, either Sam or Dean. But as Sam and Dean aged and young fans continues to enter Supernatural fandom, the fantasy has changed. No longer do these young female fans dream of dating the Winchesters—they want to be adopted by them, and fight demons together as a family unit.
And there is a lot of fanfiction to go around, because Supernatural fandom is heavily female, almost 80/20. They are also more likely to create fanworks like fanfiction, which engage with the shows they love. Fanfiction also helps bridge gaps when there is no new content, like between the seasons of a TV show. Women are also particularly social and are very likely to find fan community in dominant social media spaces.
Even though the demographics are in Supernatural’s favor, young, female fans alone can’t be the secret sauce. Compare Supernatural’s fandom to that of The Maze Runner, another extremely young, female fandom. Maze Runner fans are incredibly active on Twitter and Instagram, but aside from rallying around celebrities (like star Dylan O’Brien or author James Dashner), they don’t demonstrate the organized behavior Supernatural fans do. Because they’re not as organized, they’re not nearly as loud, and not nearly as seen.
Supernatural fans self-organize, and Maze Runner fans do not. Supernatural fans know how to put social media platforms to the most effective use, and regularly do, to make their voices heard.
The Supernatural fandom’s organization started early. At the show’s outset, many of Supernatural’s fans were female fans from other genre fandoms like The X-Files. These fandoms were early Internet adopters, their fans responsible for the first online fan archives, email lists, and fan forums. Beyond that, they understood how ratings work, and how networks operate—they would organize massive letter-writing campaigns to prove that their (often niche) shows were beloved, in efforts to keep them on the air.
When those fans migrated to Supernatural, they already understood how to use the Internet to promote their favorite shows, and how to feed their communities so that outside forces like networks and advertisers pay attention. This starts with building a community from the ground up—like the fan-run Supernatural Wiki, or Super-wiki, which has existed in some form since 2006—and directing the energies of that community toward behaviors that are visible to networks. These days, that’s hashtagging as much as letter writing.
But even though many of the older genre fans who helped establish Supernatural’s fan spaces have moved on, the structure they created set a precedent for new fans. Supernatural has maintained its youthful fandom, and therefore its fandom’s enthusiasm. Some fans have aged with the show, but other, younger fans enter the fandom each year—partly thanks to Supernatural’s presence on Netflix since 2012, which ensures that new fans can catch even the seasons of Supernatural that originally aired when they were too young to watch.
Supernatural’s fandom demographics predispose it for success, but the fandom would not have realized its full potential without the older genre fans who “founded” it. The younger viewers who came along later saw organized Tweeting patterns and established fan spaces, joined in, and Supernatural became a fandom juggernaut.
How do Supernatural fans use the Internet?
As part of a study of large entertainment fandoms, we tracked Supernatural mentions across 80 million websites from August through October. We wanted to see what Supernatural fans were talking about, where they were talking, and how information flowed between different social networks.
But, as we all know, shows have life cycles: when the show is off the air, fans turn to fanfiction, fanart, and other fanworks, since there’s no new official content. The gaps between content releases are particularly productive ones for fans, who produce their own works to keep the fandom flame alive. The “three-year summer” in Harry Potter fandom was a particularly good example of this behavior.
During our sample period, the most active social network was Twitter, followed by Instagram.
But even though fans post more on Twitter, and it might seem like the most important network, they are more engaged on Instagram. On Instagram, we saw more posts per unique user, and more likes and comments on each individual post by a long shot.
Why does Twitter seem so dominant when there are clearly active communities on both Twitter and Instagram? Twitter is not only the social media home of Supernatural’s most beloved celebrities, like Misha Collins, who plays the angel Castiel—it’s also where fans go to livetweet every new episode. In fact, the Supernatural fandom was the earliest to start livetweeting like this on a large scale. To this day, the Super-wiki chooses a hashtag for the week’s episode that fans on Twitter use for their livetweeting.
As you can see below, livetweeting is a rallying cry for the Supernatural fandom. Fans believe it’s a way to get across to the network that they are watching and loving the show—something they know Neilsen ratings, which have a relatively small sample size, may not capture.
The social networks were more evenly matched before season 12’s premiere, give or take a couple of spikes on Twitter. On some days, like Misha Collins’ birthday, Instagram posting even surpassed Tweeting. So if your goal is to reach Supernatural fans, you need to be on Instagram as well as Twitter. Twitter is where fans talk to the show and the network, but Instagram is where fans talk to each other.
Supernatural fans on the different platforms (and, make no mistake, many fans have presences on multiple platforms) use them for different purposes. Obviously, livetweeting is exclusive to Twitter — it would be hard for even the most ardent fan to post spontaneous reactions on Instagram or Tumblr, where posting is more time-consuming.
Like with livetweeting, Supernatural fans also strategically use retweeting and hashtags to bring attention to the show. The Twitter spike on September 6th comes from fans celebrating Supernatural’s Entertainment Weekly cover; fans and official social media accounts alike used the hashtag #EWxSPN. This cover was a really big deal for the fandom—not only was it Supernatural’s first EW cover, but fans had to come together and vote to make it possible. #EWxSPN was a huge victory both for Supernatural and its fans.
(Incidentally, EW definitely recognized the power of Supernatural fandom, and encouraged fans to Tweet their favorite Supernatural GIFs with the hashtag #EWxSPN too.)
On September 13th, fans celebrated the twelfth anniversary of Supernatural’s premiere with the hashtag #SupernaturalDay, which trended.
More often than not, fans express their love for shows, actors, and characters visually. They create fanart, fanvids, and photo edits—and they often share them on Instagram rather than Twitter. For example, on Misha Collins’ birthday, fans shared not only pictures of him, but photos of him from conventions he’d attended and even photos they had taken with him. Some fans created graphics specifically for the occasion.
These posts definitely celebrated Misha Collins, but not on Twitter, where he has an active presence and might see the Tweets. Fans sharing on Instagram definitely wanted Collins to have a happy birthday, but they also used his birthday to relive some of their best fannish experiences and to connect with one another, not to get his attention.
Notably, Instagram posts dropped off a bit when Supernatural started airing again, as fans took to Twitter to digest new official content.
Okay, but why does this matter?
Even within fandoms of the same property, fans can exhibit different behaviors on different websites. This isn’t shocking — the Reddit fan community for Supernatural should, and does, look different from the Tumblr community — but the way Supernatural fans use Twitter is a testament to how Internet-savvy they are. It seems like no matter where people live online during the summer hiatus, they will congregate on Twitter when it’s time to livetweet.
It’s also remarkable how separate the behaviors on Twitter and Instagram seem to be. Fans understand that Twitter is “seen” — not all the time, but certainly when appropriate hashtags are used en masse. Instagram is slightly less traceable by outside parties, and your social circle is more restricted to who you follow and who follows you. As a result, the posts there are very personal and creative, even when posted in a “visible” fandom hashtag.
As a show, Supernatural does a great job on social media, but there are many ways they could improve. One way they could do better is by engaging more with their Instagram fans. There is an active and engaged young female fan presence there, but the Supernatural Instagram only ever posts preview clips for the next episodes. Playing more to the specific tastes of both Instagram users and Supernatural fans, who have distinct tastes and patterns of behavior, would encourage activity—and community—on that platform.
In the end, each fandom is unique. Each fandom has dominant platforms that it lives on, its own set of behaviors, and its own language. Supernatural predominantly lives on Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr, but other fandoms live on Reddit, YouTube, Twitch, NeoGAF, Snapchat, Wattpad, Pinterest, Facebook, Fanfiction.Net, or even Pixiv. Supernatural fans livetweet in huge numbers, but other fandoms express themselves more subtly. To maximize opportunity, you have to be willing to dive in and get to know your fandom.
More graphs from this study can be found on our Tumblr.
