Former WWE Star Donovan Dijak Explains Connection With Fans Through Social Media

Former WWE star Donovan Dijak has explained his connection with the fans through his social media presence.

After seven years with the company, Donovan Dijak announced that he was leaving WWE after they decided to not renew his contract. Besides his work on the NXT brand, many fans found themselves connecting with Dijak through his social media presence.

Speaking with Tru Heel Heat Wrestling, Donovan Dijak was asked about building a connection with the fans on social media and the origin of “ratio.” He answered:

“I’ve always been a big believer in trying to give people the most genuine version of the television character in a lot of senses, so any time I’ve been given a character, I always dive headfirst into that character and I present myself as such in public as much as I can, in interviews and social media as much as I can in the realm of that character.”

“What happens in WWE is you do that, and if I’m tweeting in character, you can look at my first 100 tweets as Dominik Dijakovic, or as T-BAR and as just Dijak, and they’re all probably very much in character, because I don’t want there to be a tremendous disconnect between the fanbase and the product they’re watching. I don’t want them to log onto Twitter and see me cooking eggs in my house.”

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On using his characters as part of his social media presence, Dijak said:

“So what happens naturally, at least for me in WWE over the course of time, I am either given this character or part of creating the concept of these characters, and it gets booked over time.”

“At first the character is like ‘I’m going to destroy the company’, ‘I’m seeking justice’, whatever the character is, what continuously happened with me in WWE is we would present that, and that’d be the character, and then it would very quickly run it’s course, mostly because when you present something like that and it doesn’t get founded in the booking, then there starts to become a disconnect with the fans. I’m not complaining about that right, that’s reality, that’s what happened, so I need to adjust that character, because if I just say the same stuff, then it’s like shut up dude, you’re not bringing anyone to justice, you’re an idiot.”

“So what always happens is I have to pivot on social media and go back to just myself because myself is just a self deprecating s**tposter, that’s all I end up doing. So T-BAR always devolves into ‘hey check out my Bane mask’ and Dijak just evolves into ‘I’m gonna ratio you’.”

“The more I did that, especially as Dijak in the third run, the more people are starting to gravitate towards it, because they’re like this guy’s pretty funny even though he’s a big dork, and we kind of like that.”

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On WWE social media grabbing onto his “ratio” gimmick, Dijak said:

“The ratio stuff specifically started when I saw a post about NXT Underground right at the beginning of this year, and they posted it, and I was like ‘these never do any traction, they never do any numbers’ so instead of retweeting it, I was just gonna reply to it and say something that could generate some extra views for this, so I was like ‘nobody cares about this post I’m just going to see if I can ratio it’, and I did, people liked it, they thought it was funny, but the thing that I noticed about it was that when I did that the original post got twice or three times as many likes, so I was like why don’t I do this all the time.”

“The social media team got back to me a couple months later like ‘yeah it’s great just keep doing it. It gets us a bunch of views and everyone thinks it’s funny.’ Then the creative team told me ‘you on Twitter is way more interesting than you as justice vigilante guy’ so I’m just gonna continue to be myself and bring that into the realm of the character, because you can keep the presentation of the character without it being that verbatim.”

If you use this transcription or any portion of it please credit WrestleTalk.com and link to this page

Donovan Dijak said his final character in WWE NXT was “exactly” as he pitched it elsewhere in the interview, which you can read at this link.

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