MUMBAI: The social media boom has been a boon to all businesses and the entertainment business too has been no stranger to its advantages. Such is the power of the medium that the newest entrant in the English entertainment genre Viacom 18’s Colors Infinity was trending on Twitter even before it was launched. While some were paid trends, some were also organic in nature.
The channel’s strategy of airing episodes back-to-back has been garnering a lot of appreciation from consumers on Twitter. Colors Infinity relays three back-to-back episodes of every show from 9 pm to 12 pm everyday and all the shows so far have been a trending topic in India.
Recognising the importance of the all-pervasive social media, a designated team was created to draw out digital media marketing strategies for the channel. “The digital media marketing team looks after social media platforms, web and mobile initiatives. The team is completely in house and all initiatives are conceptualized, executed and evaluated by this team,” says a channel spokesperson.
Colors started the social media campaign by promoting the launch of Colors Infinity through a paid trend. Describing the strategy behind it, the spokesperson says, “A paid trend is a very effective way to put out your message to a large base of audience on a crowded platform like Twitter. For a new brand, it allows for all conversations, discussions, queries and concerns to be grouped under one umbrella.”
The paid promotion was followed by organic success galore on the same platform where the channel trended organically for four days in the launch week itself with hashtags like #ColorsInfinity, #BetterCallSaul, #FargoAT9, #TheFLASHAt9.
“We managed to do so by having meaningful conversations, providing information about the show and host a contest specific to the shows on their premiere day. In short, a paid trend ensures visibility with your TG but trending on Twitter ideally is something we would try and achieve organically,” the spokesperson opines.
The channel took a two-pronged approach to the message it wanted to send out. “To the existing viewers of English entertainment, we wanted to convey that we have the best of shows from across the world coming to your TV screen. For the new viewers, we wanted to build relevance and familiarity with this kind of content and our co-curators (Karan Johar and Alia Bhatt) helped us in reaching those audiences. So effectively, our communication objective is being served by two unique campaigns going on at the same time,” says the spokesperson.
However, notwithstanding its merits, the fact is that trending topics trend for a day or so and eventually perishes into oblivion. A new day brings forth new trends thereby questioning the sustainability of social media marketing. Speaking about the same, the spokesperson says, “Social media for us is not a launch initiative. It is the start of building a platform for the content hungry new Indian who is always seeking to know more and be up to date with the world. Our long-term social media strategy is to be known across platforms as a brand that conveys ‘Stories about Stories.’ The storylines of our shows are so strong that they evoke responses, reactions, debates and disappointments. We intend to provide an all-encompassing digital experience to be able to host all these conversations across our social media assets. The digital journey of this channel has just begun and there is a lot more from where this came from.”
As of now, Colors Infinity has over 17,000 followers on Twitter while on Facebook it has 1,90,000 followers.
While Colors Infinity has successfully managed to make its presence felt amongst the English entertainment viewers, it remains to be seen if it manages to sustain it in the long run and achieve its goal of redefining the space.
