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Dean Cas Wedding Tweet Report

Now that the dust has settled, I wanted to do a quick after action report on the #DeanCasWedding trend. For those who aren’t aware. #Dean Cas Wedding trended on Twitter, based on some recurring Supernatural castmates sending a tweet about Dean and Cas getting married at the roadhouse. 

Destiel fans ran with this theory and created a fictional wedding between Dean and Castiel on Valentines Day. The hash tag trended for 8 hours, and peaked at #4 on Twitter’s United States trending top 30. In the end it generated 46.3k tweets. 

I am doing a deeper social media analysis of the hash tag findings to better understand Destiel fan activity, during this campaign please. Further details are shared here as follows: 

Overall Campaign Metrics

As posted before the majority of this campaign was based on retweets - 67% of this campaign was based off of retweets from 13.7k original tweets. 33% of the campaign came from original content. For scale that means of the 46.3k tweets that were generated during the Dean Cas Wedding trend ~30k came from retweets. 

This means that the Destiel fan base has a predilection to retweet and spamming continuously to get their hash tags to trend.

Size of Destiel’s Fanbase/Stanbase

So this is the interesting story. Of the individual who participated in the campaign there were 2.6k active contributors, 5.3k total contributors, this means we can deduce that 2.7k or so were just retweet contributors. The 2.7k numbers are “passive” contributors in that they did not create any new content with their tweets. While the 2.6k active participants are the tweeters who created original content that fueled the hashtag. This means that 5.3k people in total fueled enough content to create a 43.6k hashtag campaign. 

Supernatural’s Viewership Cross Reference

For context the average Supernatural episode in the last season attracted 1.1 million viewers. Quick facts to put this in perspective: 

For every 208,000 general fan of Supernatural you will find 1 Destiel, Misha Minon, or Destiel Extreme shipper stan

Destiel as a fanbase is less than 1% of the Supernatural audience/fan base (precisely less than .5% of the general audience)

The average Destiel fan tweets 5-8 times to get something to trend

When an extreme Destiel fan screams that “they made Supernatural what it is”, “that they are the majority of the audience”, and that everyone wanted “Dean and Castiel together”, show them these numbers. All in all, the reach of this fanbase is quite small. Their hash tag campaign had an overall reach of 3 million people. 

Cross comparison: Destiel’s hash-tag vs. Walker’s Live Tweeting

For scale Walker reached 12 million people when they trended for “Don’t Fence Me In” with a fraction of the tweets they had (46.3k vs. 11.7k). 

#DeanCasWedding (2/14)

#Walker (Don’t Fence Me In, Live Tweet 2/11)

What Corporations Value

This is why Supernatural and CW executives do not take Destiel and their hash tag campaigns seriously. 67% of this campaign is basically just re-tweets, which is what devalues this campaign in terms of meaningful social media engagement that corporations and stations look for. The value of the campaign is not there despite the high tweet count (Trended at #4, and generated 46.3k tweets but with no substance). The problem for Destiel fans is that their conversation is all insular, which is why the reach is so small. You have a max of 5k people talking about a ship, and a less than 3k actually pushing it. It is basically just these small .5% of audience members talking to each other and passing the ball between themselves back and forth.  

Destiel’s existing echo chamber

If you are interested in knowing who those individuals are look no further. I broke down the Top 10 Most active members during the campaign and top 10 for original tweets and retweets. You may see some familiar faces: 

Lastly, we will delve into the age of the twitter accounts who were active during the campaign. 

As seen here a sizable portion of this tweet campaign comes from twitter accounts that are less than 1 year old. This is an obvious indicator for multiple accounts and fake accounts. It shows that the two biggest splits here are twitter accounts that are less than 1 year old, and others that are 6 years or older. Combine this finding with the retweet threshold (67%) it’s highly likely that there  is some double dipping going on here. Remember the average Destiel account retweets things 5-8 times. As we can take a look from the most popular tweeters during the campaign some of them tweeted an excess of 400 times just from one handle. The top 10 tweeters during the campaign generated 3k tweets just amongst themselves.  

As such it’s likely that the 5.3k number shared here is inflated, with much of this engagement coming from fake accounts, double accounts which aren’t a genuine reflection of actual population size. I hypothesize that about a third of this fanbase is a result of multiple accounts. Especially since many Destiel fans say that they’ve been watching since season 4. How is it that a third of the audience just came aware of Destiel in the past year, when Castiel has been on the show since Season 4? 

Summary

The Destiel fans need things to cling onto. Often when they try to trend spontaneously as in response to Misha’s instagram video on the 13th the trend only got 8k tweets before it collapsed. They need to latch onto a social justice themes to trend (Eileen), they need to latch onto Jensen and Dean’s fanbase along with LGBTQIA+ representation that exists in other fanbases to partner in order to trend (Shameless Gallavocih, MCU’s Stucky and Teen Wolf’s Sterek). But even for all of their efforts it doesn’t really mean anything in the end, when you look at the numbers and review the context.

In conclusion, I know this is a long post but I wanted to double down on a few things. The Destiel, Misha Minon, Extreme Destiel fans are not the majority. They don’t have a lot of power amongst their group. The economic value of this hash tag campaign doesn’t compare to the likes of live tweeting events generated from the CW during their live tweet shows: Batwoman, Legacies or Riverdale. Definitely not Walker. Even when they try to trend with all their might they can’t equal or make a significant dent in social media engagement that means anything to the network. This is why the CW has ignored them. As such I hope that this tumblr post can help people understand how small the fanbase is, and how their bullying and smear campaigns are insignificant and don’t amount to anything. I hope this number can give people perspective and context to what this crazy stan base has led to with all their tantrums, doxing, anti-voting sprees and generally toxic behavior. Ultimately I hope this post shows that they are insignificant. Let’s let them be so.