Creating a shared experience

Entertainment brands know that social media is about conversations and shared experiences. They know that many viewers like to tweet about the TV programmes they’re watching, while they are watching them.

In November 2013, the Doctor Who 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor, was broadcast simultaneously in 90 countries and averaged 2,745 tweets per minute.

Doctor Who viewing figures

Entertainment brands, like Doctor Who, are capitalising on this interest, by getting involved in the conversation themselves, and pre-planning tweets to publish at crucial moments.

The Walking Dead twitter account focuses heavily on building up to episodes and new series. It holds Twitter Q&As, posts behind the scenes images and shares pictures fans take after using its app to turn themselves into zombies (check out #zombieyourself for some gruesome images).

Around 5.17m people see tweets about The Walking Dead during each episode.

Get the superstars involved

Sports entertainment brand WWE was shortlisted for the best brand on Twitter shorty award in 2014. As of February 2014 it had more than 79m followers spread over its Twitter accounts (it has at least 146 superstars on Twitter).

It has around 250m social media followers in total. John Cena alone has more than 17m Facebook fans.

It also spawns cross-over artists – the most successful being Dwayne Johnson, who has more than 7.4m followers on Twitter.

The actors who starred in hit TV show, Breaking Bad, took to their own Twitter accounts to promote and discuss the show.

Breaking Bad achieved between 6m and 9.1m tweets per episode.

People don’t follow products, they follow people. They want to peek behind the curtain. Brands need to create evangelists out of their own top performers, raise their public profiles and let them show the people behind the brand.

Unite the community

Game of Thrones is the series that’s currently cornered the market in must-watch TV moments. You don’t want to be one of the people sitting there, hopelessly behind on episodes, as millions of people tweet about red and purple weddings.

The season four premiere saw more than 600,000 tweets on the day. The Game of Thrones Twitter account was shortlisted for a shorty award for best brand on Twitter.

While most brands aren’t going to have many #RoastJoffrey moments, there is an opportunity for brands.

They need to know what their followers want, and give it to them. This helps build a strong relationship between the brand and its audience.

Take it offline

Orange Is The New Black took an idea from the show and made it a social media, and offline sensation.

The #CrazyPyes van travels around neighbourhoods and serves people crazy pies and chocolate and vanilla swirl ice cream. Once one person spotted the van, pictures of it started popping up all over social media.

OITNB van

Coca-Cola, while very active on social media, also does offline stunts. It dots vending machines around the world, which do everything from issue freebies to passing people, to tasking the thirsty to dance for their drinks.

And for more examples, check out David Moth’s post on 10 cool experiential marketing campaigns.

Be ready to act

House of Cards knows its audience, and knows that the show is popular with politicians. The Twitter account sometimes replies to politician’s tweets:

Those behind @HouseofCards know who their constituents are, and they’re ready to comment on almost any tweet that they spot.

Brands like Oreo have shown that they can be quick to take advantage of opportunities to grab the social media headlines with a bit of spontaneous fun. It’s not just entertainment brands that can live for the moment now and again.

Social media is about connecting with people, which is also what the entertainment industry is all about.

But are other brands all that different really? Entertainers are selling a product too, but most do it in such a sophisticated and engaging way that people don’t notice, or don’t care. Other brands can learn a lot from their approach to social.