Disney’s Online Presence
For this analysis, I looked at Disney’s presence on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. I wanted to keep my scope broad enough that I could encapsulate the brand that Disney is trying to portray to its viewing audience, yet not so broad that my analysis got too overwhelming.
Most of the posts are a mix between promotions for their upcoming and recently released movies — primarily Coco, Black Panther, Han Solo, Moana — as well as older properties like A Bugs Life and Finding Nemo. There is also the occasional food post, picture of Disney World, or meme. I was very surprised to see that they were actively posting about movies that aren’t exactly relevant anymore. This makes me think that their social media is primarily for older audiences, which makes sense given that there aren’t many young children active on Twitter.
Nonetheless, Disney is a family brand, and so they are careful to maintain their image. Every post is family friendly, even their memes are carefully selected to be non-offensive, family-oriented content. The tone is most certainly fun and PG-rated. They do not, for instance, post about the upcoming Deadpool movie — though Disney now owns that property as well, and Disney has never been shy about posting about any of their other recently acquired franchises — such as Marvel and LucasFilms.
I think overall they do an excellent job with keeping their social media updated so that its appealing to the audience, though it is clear that they don’t necessarily want the Disney name associated with the raunchy, R-rated Deadpool franchise, as popular and lucrative though it may be.
Another thing that I noticed that across all their platforms, they rarely if ever duplicate the same post. Usually if they make a post about the same topic, like the Black Panther movie for example, they will at least use different pictures or try to engage the audience in a different way. This is nice for those viewers who may follow Disney on all platforms, as it means they won’t be getting several notifications to look at the same content.
I couldn’t find much brand interaction between Disney and their audience. There are plenty of comments on their posts, for example, the teaser trailer for the Han Solo movie has plenty of fans leaving their opinions in the comments and responding to each other but very little of Disney reacting to what they’re actually saying. It could be because of the massive amount of comments they receive every day makes it difficult to respond, or perhaps they worry that responding will somehow negatively affect the brand they have so carefully culminated.
Personally, I think it seems a bit odd that a brand that tries to be as friendly and welcoming doesn’t have more interaction with its fan base. That being said, I can also see how a company as large as Disney would be hesitant about responding too much. A lot of the comments on the Han Solo movie, for instance, was criticism — Disney could not conceivably respond to that because fans have the right to complain, and also because if they tried to allot time to responding to criticism they would be there for a very, very long time.
Considering that, I do think that Disney’s social media presence accurately reflects the brand that Disney tries to portray in its movies, theme parks, and toys. Moving forward, I think it would be nice if Disney would have more of an engaging social media presence, beyond just posting content they think will be appealing to their audience. One way they could do this is through Instagram polls, which would be a fun and easy way to get fans to visit the Instagram page more.
