The Fracturing of Fan Community

Olivia Rodrigo’s top fan-led channel on Twitter, @liviesHQ, was a core part of her fan engagement strategy over the past few years. Now, that fan community is fragmented between 114k followers on X and 119k followers on Threads. The battle between Threads and X, and undeniably the political party line and social issue stances associated with them, is driving a wedge within fan communities built on Twitter.

While so much of the rift between Threads and X has focused on their lead executives (sounds like that Zuck & Musk fight is nearly confirmed -- gross), social communities once glued together by the simple shared love for a creator, talent or IP, are now complicated as fans can’t help but take a stance around the social POV of X. While some brands have reported higher engagement from their owned handle on Threads, fan-led accounts and the social communities that surround a property are getting caught in the cross hairs of this X vs. Threads platform battle. NBA Twitter, for example, the highly engaged segment of NBA fans that drive the narrative across internet culture, recently saw a significant loss in engagement. When Elon Musk fanned the flames of vaccine conspiracy theories in the wake of news surrounding LeBron James’ son, a chunk of NBA Twitter had an overnight mass exodus to Threads.

Fan communities can be integral to a campaign’s audience development, particularly with the approach of expanding outward from a built-in audience around talent or known IP. While fandom of course exists across multiple platforms without entirely relying on X, consider how historically partnering with “updates accounts” like @liviesHQ, or even “fan cam” accounts as part of your influencer approach, will now require a broader approach to activate a fan community between those that remain on X, and those that have taken up the cause on other platforms.