With a new season of My Hero Academia right around the corner, online chatter about the hit anime series is starting to dominate social media.
Analyst Miles Thomas recently compiled data regarding social media engagement for some of the most popular new series and what he found was a growing popularity in engagement involving anime.
"On social media, anime punches above its weight class," he wrote. Thomas posted a graphic depicting social media engagement over the past 30 days (from March 16 through April 15) and the results may surprise some.
While Prime Video's Fallout series dominated the topic of conversation with 7.3M relevant keywords, next on the list was My Hero Academia.
With 4.7M engagements, the hit anime series was the second most-talked-about series on social media, ahead of Disney's X-Men '97 and Prime Video's Invincible.
Engagement was tracked across Twitter/X, Instagram, and Facebook on "English-language posts featuring relevant keywords from March 16 - April 15, 2024."
My Hero Academia is already one of the most popular anime series in the world but as the once-niche genre continues to become more accessible, more viewers become exposed to the series.
On top of that, the series is gearing up to release its seventh season, which is surely increasing the number of people talking about it. Additionally, My Hero Academia: Memories, a four-episode series that recaps the "epic moments of the series thus far" debuted earlier this month. The four episodes are releasing throughout the month of April, leading into the Season 7 debut of the show on May 4th. My Hero Academia Season 7 will stream globally on Crunchyroll.
What's also fascinating is that My Hero Academia is hardly the only anime making waves on social media. Also mentioned on the list is KonoSuba, Mushoku Tensei, Reincarnated as a Slime, and Kaiju No. 8. Of the 10 series featured in the list, five of them are anime shows.
Thomas acknowledges that with so many streaming platforms now available, it's hard to gauge viewership numbers. "Social media engagement may not be the best proxy for viewership," he says, "but there's still plenty to be gleaned."
Perhaps the biggest takeaway here is the growing popularity of anime, especially as more streaming services continue to invest in it.