Last week was Shark Week, Discovery Channel’s massively popular week of shark-themed programming. Originally created to raise awareness about the species and their conservation, Shark Week has received a lot of bad press over the years for excessive scare-mongering, fake documentaries, and scientific inaccuracy.

This year, Discovery Channel created a huge social buzz by vowing to tone down the sensationalism and offer a more educational Shark Week.

The event was extremely present on social media and encouraged scientists and marine biologists to get involved with educating viewers. But did Shark Week’s new image shine through on Twitter? Using the Visibrain platform, we can look back at what happened on Twitter during #SharkWeek.

Twitter dives into Shark Week fever

Shark Week is a much-anticipated event in America, so it’s no surprise that the event generated intense Twitter activity. If we look at the overall timeline, we can see that the response on Twitter was impressive: between Sunday 5th July and Monday 13th of July, there were 857,202 tweets about Shark Week.

Twitter activity started to rise from July 5th as Shark Week began, and the scientific theme seemed to be off to a good start. Discovery Channel’s promise of more educational programming attracted a lot of attention, and on the first night of Shark Week, a link to an article about the changes was the second most retweeted of the day.

However, the lion’s share of Shark Week tweets came from another source.

Shark Week gets a boost from celebrity tweets

On July 6th Twitter activity peaked with 287,461 tweets. If we zoom in on July 6th, we can see that the peak started at 7.46 am, the exact time that Justin Bieber posted this tweet:

Hey @joe_termini it's #SharkWeek lol

— Justin Bieber (@justinbieber) July 6, 2015

The pop star’s tweet was retweeted a staggering 40,476 times, the most popular post of Shark Week. The event gained a lot of visibility from these kinds of celebrity tweets, as Cameron Dallas and Katy Perry also figure in the top ten.

Brands flood Twitter with Shark Week-themed ads

Brands also jumped on the Shark Week bandwagon to promote their products. Malibu Rum, Red Bull, Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Jamba Juice were among those who came up with Shark Week spin-offs, but Purina Tidy Cats published the most popular brand tweet. The cat litter brand’s post below was retweeted 1,116 times over the course of Shark Week.

Enough #SharkWeek. It’s time to give the Internet what it really wants. All kittens, all the time. #KittenWeek pic.twitter.com/dEs12pgMyK

— Tidy Cats (@TidyCats) July 6, 2015

Funny content is king

It’s been said that cute animal pictures and humorous posts get the most attention on social media, and this proved to be absolutely true for Shark Week. The most popular video of the week was a Vine of a dog in a bathtub with a clockwork shark toy.

Sweet, but not what you would call educational.

By the end of July 6th, Shark Week had already racked up 333,933 tweets, generating a huge amount of visibility for the event. All of the free publicity was great news for the network’s viewer ratings, but it did mean that unfortunately, the conservationist message got a bit drowned out to begin with.

Twitter’s tides turn for the second half of Shark Week

After the initial Twitter storm, activity around Shark week died down to more manageable levels, allowing its more educational side to show through.

A constant message that struggled to be noticed

If we look at top hashtags for July 5th and sixth, we can see certain pro-shark hashtags such as #racingextinction, #diversesharks, #sharkfact and #savesharks that come through as very weak signals.

By July 9th, #peopleneedsharks and #sharkscience were in the top ten most used hashtags.

If we look at the overall timeline, we can see that although there was a rise in usage from July 9th, these hashtags were used constantly throughout Shark Week, but simply went unnoticed over the first few days when general activity was very high.

Shark Week promotes its more scientific image

The @SharkWeek Twitter handle tweeted 167 times over the course of Shark Week, a great deal of which promoted its upcoming programming.

In honor of Shark Week, Discovery Channel launched a dedicated website called Sharkopedia, aiming to educate people with interesting facts about sharks and their plight as a species. If we use the Visibrain feature to filter on tweets linking to Sharkopedia, we can see that there were only 1,330 tweets linking to the site, very few compared to the overall number of tweets for Shark Week.

However, if we filter on the most retweeted post about Sharkopedia, we can see that it was retweeted by influential animal protection charities and marine conservationists. This means that even though the Sharkopedia tweets didn’t generate a lot of engagement, they were relayed by Twitter handles with a lot of followers, guaranteeing high numbers of impressions. This added visibility most likely drew many visitors to the site, which was good news for Discovery Channel.

Experts take to Twitter to talk about Shark Week

This year, Shark Week had the support of a number of experts in the field of shark study. The event promoted its “Finbassadors”, marine biologists that it had encouraged to interact with fans on Twitter.

If we look closer at tweets containing the word “finbassador”, we can see that @Georgienne and @shawnheinrich were the users with the most mentions.

The official Finbassadors weren’t the only ones to speak up however. There were 4,240 tweets originating from Twitter accounts with the word « biologist » in their bio. The most popular was marine biologist David Shiffman @whysharksmatter, who was retweeted 1,069 times.

The fact that so many experts were willing to associate themselves with the event is good news for Shark Week’s image turnaround, even if there wasn’t a huge amount of engagement with fans.

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Shark Week is now over for another year, and even if the event’s more educational side didn’t take Twitter by storm, it was obviously a hit with fans, as Discovery Channel recently announced record viewer numbers. Hopefully, its more educational outlook will have helped to reveal the truth about sharks and raise awareness about protecting the species.

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