Yesterday a third of the UK Twitter population and 4% of UK Facebookers heard news about One Direction, after Channel 4 aired a documentary that turned the lens on the boy band’s most intense fans, aka ‘Directioners' or 'superfans'.
Crazy About One Direction introduced viewers to what could safely be described as a bizarre sub-culture that revolves around the frenzied adoration of Harry Styles, Liam Payne, Louis Tomlinson, Niall Horan and Zayn Malik.
Fans tell of how they monitor the boys’ social media profiles (mostly Twitter) to try and chart their movements and engineer encounters with them. One young girl describes Twitter as a kind of “praying place” for One Direction worship: ‘When you go to a preying place, you feel like you’re connected to God. So when you go to twitter, you feel like you’re connected to 1D. You just have… hope.’
Top words mentioned alongside One Direction on Twitter yesterday were “1d”, “directioners”, “fans”, “harry”, “styles”, “crazy”, “documentary”, “directioner” and “crazyabout1d”.
Interestingly, while 1D’s fan-base is predominantly made-up of teenage girls, the audience hearing about the band on Twitter yesterday was slightly more male – 54% versus 46% female. On Facebook, however, the audience was far more weighted towards females – 65% versus 35% male.
Image courtesy of Getty
