If you were a living breathing human on the internet this past week, you most definitely saw the viral revival of the Casey Anthony case. Last Sunday’s launch of Casey Anthony: An American Murder Mystery drew almost 3 million unique viewers in Live, same day ratings for Investigation Discovery. This made it the best telecast premiere and best series debut in network history.
It’s not common for a launch to gain this much traction, so our analysts were curious at what caused such a spike. We used a series of tools and software to find out exactly what techniques the brand used to raise awareness for their show.
In fact, the campaign gained so much notoriety, the #CaseyAnthony hashtag remained trending for hours after the show. Some users reported the hashtag reaching as high as the first or second position, depending on their region and location. While you would expect a hashtag to gain trending status from a TV debut on a mainstream channel, it’s almost completely impossible for networks outside of HBO, Showtime or Fox to gain enough traction to become a trending hashtag.
Trending Hashtag reached the Top 3 Globally Trending Hashtags.
After our own investigation, it was quite clear that the success of the show’s debut was largely driven by a brilliantly crafted sponsored campaign rooted in social media influencers. These Twitter influencers drummed up an unprecedented amount of hype for the show, causing the sponsored hashtag to trend globally on national Twitter.
Following the push of these branded sponsored posts, 1000’s of everyday people (and even other influencers) joined the trend, paving the way for an successful TV Debut.
In this post, we’ve lifted the covers to analyze exactly how a brand can use next generation marketing tactics to result in every user on social media tuning in to the debut of their new show. Take one out of Investigation Discovery’s influencer marketing playbook and follow their lead, because this is one of the most powerful campaigns we’ve seen all year.
Historically, influencer marketing has performed exceptionally well for tune-in to new TV shows, but Investigation Discovery’s Casey Anthony show took over Twitter by storm. The network invented a new strategy we have not yet seen. They partnered with other TV stars, a brilliant move given the audience they were reaching. These TV stars (specifically, reality TV stars) have an audience that consumes, you guessed it, TV.
For this reason, their audience is far more likely to engage with the #CaseyAnthony hashtag.
For marketers and influencer marketing managers who are looking to either break into the landscape or refine the launch of a new TV show or product, now is an ideal time. For the first time ever, our analysts saw a branded influencer campaign excel to the top trending hashtag nationally. The strategy is much different than normal media marketing, and even much different than traditional social media influencer marketing.
Let’s take a look at some of their sponsored tweets:
Following the lead kickstarted by sponsored posts, many other social media caught on the trend.
Shane Dawson is a YouTube personality, actor, author, sketch comedian, singer, songwriter and film director. He’s grown to be one of the largest influencers on all of social media, with over 10 million followers. Dawson was known for making comedy videos featuring recurring original characters he has created (such as Shananay, Ned the Nerd, S. Deezy, Mom, Aunt Hilda, Fruitlupe and Amy) and he has grown to amass a passionate following. We noticed his tweet a couple days after the sponsored posts, further proving the viral success of the sponsored campaign.
Outside of the above post, we noticed significant engagement from 15 former Big Brother contestants, a few former talk show hosts, and other mainstream influencers. The Big Brother audience was a perfect target, given that it is a very internet based show and fans of the show are tech savy & very into social media, the brand affinity overlap with DiscoveryID’s Casey Anthony: An American Murder Mystery was perfect.
How big was this campaign? According to our sources, the Twitter campaign reached over over 40 Million unique people. Bear in mind, much of that reach was organic reach from the additional exposure following the trending hashtag. None the less, it’s safe to say that the strategy played a critical role in achieving such a successful reach.
If you want to follow their lead, take note of a few major actions:
- Partner with extremely relevant social media influencers
- Align the goal. If you want to reach people that talk about TV, work with influencers whose followers talk about TV.
- Sponsor targeted influencers that will be used to draw up hype prior to the launch of the show.
- Carefully craft post language to boost user engagement.
- Do not use an overly promotional hashtag. Keep it generic, but relevant enough for your brand.
- Take note to engage micro-influencers that can boost the overall reach of the campaign
- Make sure all influencers post at the same time in order to get the campaign trending.
One thing is for sure, there’s still opportunity for more brands to follow the lead of Investigation Discovery, learn the ropes, and come out with their own sponsored campaigns.