Our organic revenue increased by 99% in 8 months during my time as a content creator for a digital marketing agency in the entertainment sector in Istanbul.
This story is an example of how streaming giants like Disney+ and Netflix attract viewers and bring in millions through social media content.
As a former Social Media Specialist and Content Creator for the FOX series now streaming on Disney+, I uncovered the secrets of successful digital marketing.
Essentially, my job was to watch special scene videos and create content that would get people’s attention so they would click on the video and ultimately watch the entire episode or TV series.
I’d post about 100 videos per day on Facebook, and it was surprising to see how many people watch series on this social media platform.
The market for series is huge!
Nowadays, people watch more series than ever, and there are thousands of them accessible to everyone.
This business is a multi-billion dollar market that is talked about but not fully understood.
So here is what I learned:
One Video Can Generate Lifetime Income
Streaming platforms generate revenue through monetization.
In this way, they don’t pay Meta to be promoted.
Meta pays them because they post entertaining content that keeps people on Facebook.
So, every 2 minutes, an ad can be added to the video.
That means the longer the video, the more ads can be added, which equals more income.
Subsequently, for every person who clicks on the ad, both the agency that posted the content and the producer gets paid.
In my experience Facebook, which, unlike YouTube, is not even the go-to platform for watching series. The videos that had a regular performance made between $100 to $500 in a week.
Imagine just one video generating this kind of revenue.
It’s a video that will always be there, will not be deleted, and like a money machine, will always generate income.
For example, when I posted this video on January 6th, 2022, it reached 500K views and generated $1,000 in income in one week.
Now, it has 7.5M views, which means that it is still generating income, and during Pride month in June, the number might go up.
Also, we are just talking about one short video.
Normally, on these series pages on Facebook, a minimum of 3 short and 3 long videos are posted on a daily basis.
The Key to Viral Content: The Perfect Title
As Robert Kiyosaki said in his best-selling book “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” books sell because of their titles. I believe this applies to all forms of content in marketing.
The title is the first impression people get before consuming content.
People are more likely to read a complete blog post, watch a video, or listen to a podcast if the title is catchy.
In the case of social media content for a serie, you could have a boring video with terrible content, but if you have a great title that grabs attention, your video could go viral.
This has happened to me many times.
I created content for terrible series repeatedly, but because of the titles, they reached thousands of views.
Here, creativity is everything.
The formula of a great title:
Short + Catchy + Accurate + Relatable
However, a great title comes with responsibility.
While it’s important to have a catchy and attention-grabbing title, it’s equally important to ensure that the title reflects the content of the post or video.
Misleading titles that don’t reflect the content of the post or video are often considered clickbait and could result in a negative impression of your brand or your content.
Platforms like social media have strict guidelines on misleading content, and if your content is found to be in violation of those guidelines, it could lead to your content being banned or removed.
The Power of Kisses: The Rule You Should Know
Kisses are the primary source of traffic in the entertainment sector, and showing them on the video thumbnail is almost a rule.
To promote series, if there is a kissing scene in the episode, it’s mandatory to put that photo on the thumbnail because these types of videos have higher reach and engagement than a normal video, maybe 20 times more.
Actually to be honest I didn’t feel good with this rule in the beginning because it wasn’t seeming ethical to me, but what I noticed is that people want this type of content, and the results talk by themselves.
From my experience I could say that people are looking for this type of content in the series ambiance, so if the audience wants that, shouldn’t we provide that for them?
If the thumbnails aren’t attention-grabbing no one will ever watch the video, so people would miss watching something they would probably like.
Your Audience Connects Through Authentic and Emotional Content
People love to connect in a human way.
For this reason, most content goes viral when people resonate with it.
For example, one of the pages I managed, whose performance impressed me the most, was a series called “Amor a Segunda Vista” (In Love Again).
I must say, after creating, optimizing, and posting content daily for 2 months, ideas were just flowing to me.
I stopped overthinking, which was good for content creation, as it made it more intuitive and simple, and helped people connect more with what I posted.
I would watch a few seconds of the scene and come up with an idea. When I posted the special scene videos of this series, the audience loved it. In less than a week, we got 12,000 new followers.
This particular video increased the followers exponentially in just three days because many single moms resonated with it.
The video is a special scene from the series where an immigrant, who used to live in the USA, has to go back to her country because she became a single mom.
The comment section was filled with comments from other women, mainly Latin American moms, who expressed how challenging and sad its to raise a child alone and how they resonated with the video.
However, it should be noted that although the video itself is engaging, the title plays a crucial role.
If the title wasn’t good, people wouldn’t even click to watch the full video.
There was an identical video with a different title that reached far fewer people and had less engagement.
Final Thoughts
As the market for digital content continues to grow, it is important for content creators and marketers to stay on top of the latest trends and strategies to succeed in the highly competitive world of entertainment.
With the right techniques and approach, any series can attract a loyal following and generate substantial income through social media.
