TV SHOWS AND MOVIES ON SOCIAL MEDIA

These days information gets to us in new and interesting ways. Through social media we can access all types of new information, including that about our favourite TV shows and movies. So I have taken upon myself to find out about them; how to tell if they are a fan account or not; what is actually posted on these accounts and what the students at NCG think of them.

How to tell if the account is legitimate (not a fan account). Now before we get into how the accounts are used and how you can use them, we need to establish how to tell if these accounts are legitimate. The reason we need to be able to find out if an account is fake or not is because some accounts can pretend to be the real thing but are actually supplying the wrong information, which is very unhelpful. The main social media sites we are looking at are Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Thankfully they all have a similar way to recognise if the account is fake or not, there is a white tick surrounded by a blue bubble, which varies between sites. A variation is pictured below.


These symbols should be next to, or just below the name of any legitimate account. However it is possible that an account has not been verified when you look at it. So if you cannot find any other accounts of the same TV show or movie with a verification symbol then to identify whether it is legitimate you can; scroll through the posts to make sure there aren’t any ‘fan’ posts; check to see if there are any ‘off-screen’ posts (actors etc. off-screen whilst filming) as these are a lot harder to fake. Following one of these sets of instructions you will be able to determine whether the account is fake or not and therefore if you are getting reliable information.


What are posted on these accounts? After tirelessly scrolling through countless posts on these accounts I have come to a conclusion. All the accounts post a lot of different things but they all seem to be able to fit into a few categories. Of course, between different sites what is posted differs slightly but not massively, and they all seem to have a similar purpose. This is to promote their show. They do this in quite a few ways; pictures showing some of the best or most popular moments from the show; teaser videos to show what might be coming in the next weeks; countdowns to a new episode, especially if it is a significant one; quotes (usually in picture form) and more. These posts will usually increase in frequency in times of importance in terms of the show. This means that when it is a season premiere, season finale, double episode or something else pivotal in the show there will be a lot more posts filling your feed from that TV show. With movies there are less or even only one of these increases because there are a lot less events in terms of how many different viewings (separate things) there are, this does mean, however, that they may post more frequently than the TV shows at this time. There can also be written posts (their content varies) these are few and far between for TV show and movie accounts and are mainly on Twitter and sometimes Facebook but not Instagram. Of course there are more things that these accounts post but they are usually a lot more account specific and the things listed above are generally the main things posted on social media accounts of TV shows and movies.

So what do NCG students think of TV shows and movie’s social media accounts and how they use these accounts? In a survey of 87 NCG students 52% of people follow one or more legitimate social media accounts of a TV show or movie and 18% of people regularly access but do not follow one of these accounts and 44% of these people only access but do not follow. One interesting result from this survey was that I found out that the majority of people access these accounts (the ones they do not follow) once a week, which is much more healthy than I was expecting, which was once a day. Another interesting thing this survey showed was that 47% of people who followed one of these accounts followed the same TV show or movie on multiple sites. The most popular site for accessing these accounts is Facebook and so I therefore encourage you to use this site as well. Overall people found that in a scale from 1 to 10, the accounts were a 5 in terms of how informative these accounts were. This shows that although these accounts are instrumental in getting viewers (otherwise they wouldn’t have them) but for some people it is less about getting information and more about seeing more about the show you like. All of this information shows that as a school we have diverse ideas about whether these accounts are worth the time, how informative they are and how to use them.

So now you know about how to tell if an account is fake, and therefore could be providing false information; what’s posted on these accounts and what the girls at NCG think of these accounts, you can use these accounts to their full potential. I encourage you to go out there and look up your favourite TV show or movie. Find out if their social media accounts are good, bad or anywhere in between.