Comic books, massive movie franchise panels, complicated and colorful costumes in all manner of geekery….San Diego Comic-Con is almost upon us, and as such, we asked ourselves, “With this massive amount of buzz being generated around this one event, who’s coming out on top?”

San Diego Comic-Con is a massive event and involves numerous industries. The comic book industry, the film industry, toys and merchandising, and many others come together to showcase their products to an increasingly receptive audience. “Geeks” are the new cool, and marketers are learning how to take advantage of the incredible potential Social Media has to offer them. Using Social Intelligence data, companies can get an idea of not only how much buzz their brands are generating but also how people are generally feeling about those brands.

This is especially important in competitive benchmarking, and nowhere else in the comic-book and film industry is there a bigger rivalry than DC Comics vs Marvel. In recent years, DC Comics has struggled to keep up with Marvel’s blockbuster success in the film and entertainment industry, often relying solely on their Batman franchise to compete. Now that they’ve started to branch out with hit films Superman vs Batman and Wonder Woman while also adopting some of Marvel’s successful marketing strategies, our data shows DC Comics has become extremely competitive with Marvel in the Social Media sphere.

At Synthesio, we decided to take a look at which studio (and their superheroes) is generating the most social media mentions going into San Diego Comic-Con.

 

 

While Marvel takes the lion’s share of Share of Voice, taking in the most mentions overall with a whopping 67.37%, DC Comics takes the edge in overall positive sentiment with an SRS score of 64.07, compared to Marvel’s 60.46.

Additionally, DC Comics comes out on top again with the most talked about superhero franchise, the Justice League at 20.23% of all mentions, which can be mostly attributed to the hype surrounding its upcoming film adaptation. Overall, the two studios are neck-in-neck with each other for overall superhero Share of Voice. Marvel’s superheroes just barely take the win with 50.99% of social media mentions.

Marvel, however, comes back with the top two most positively received franchises, with Spiderman (64.90) and the Avengers (63.90) respectively. An interesting insight for marketers to note here is how despite generating the most buzz, the Justice League comes dead last in SRS score with just 57.53. This is a perfect example of how important it is for marketers not to lose sight of the bigger picture. A high Share of Voice, coupled with a low SRS score, can actually indicate that a franchise is doing poorly compared to a competitor with a slightly lower Share of Voice, but higher Social Reputation Score.

This was a hard fought online battle, but using the insights gathered from Synthesio’s exhaustive Social Listening platform, I’m going to have to give Marvel the edge here. Their heroes generated the most positive mentions overall while staying pretty competitive with DC Comics in every category.

Interested in learning more about how we use Social Reputation Score to give a complete picture of how you stack up against your competitors? Click below to download our eBook, Measuring Sentiment and Benchmarking Success: A Guide to Synthesio’s Social Reputation Score