Social Media Strategy Review: Channel [V]

Channel , a leading youth channel, offers a mix of content customised to the Indian youth. Initially a music based channel, it is now moving towards the GEC category with a specific focus on youth based shows.

Channel on Facebook

With a community size of over 3 million, the channel is growing rapidly at a 17.4% growth rate. It maintains a consistent average, with 3-4 posts per day.

Unlike most youth channels in India, Channel ’s Facebook strategy is focused on the shows that the channel produces. The posts stimulate discussion around characters and the story plot. Apart from these posts, there are also a number of generic posts about love and friendship. However, in spite of an extremely active YouTube channel, not a lot of content is shared from the same on the Facebook page.

There are campaigns around new shows and contests during festivals. For instance, the show Crazy Stupid Ishq had repeated posts promoting the characters of the show even before the cast had been revealed. During the Holi season, they used a Facebook application letting fans splash colours on their favourite characters and also distributed gift hampers.

The page generates branded content which is targeted towards fostering a debate among fans on the page. These posts have questions which have long been discussed among  youngsters. They are also receiving some good engagement as compared to other posts.

A great deal of promotion on the Facebook page was seen for the movie Fukrey. Apart from that, there was some promotion seen for movies being screened on Movies OK, which is regular for Star Channels.

Channel has also created an application named Longest Band of Friendship, an interactive application with a viral reach, which is a creative way of building on the popularity of Friendship Day among the youth.

Unfortunately, even though the channel is creating decent content and making use of applications, it is losing out on the essence of social media. The channel fails to communicate with its fans. Largely non-responsive for a majority of the posts, the channel was spotted replying to comments in extremely few scenarios. Hundreds of fan posts which isn't spam and is appreciative in nature, or are questions about content are left unanswered.

Channel on Twitter

With over 45K followers, the channel is also growing as much as Facebook at 20.1%. It makes 4 tweets a day which is less than the average tweets made by other channels in the sector.

In terms of content shared, the amount of tweets and the frequency of the same is dismal. A positive here is that they respond, retweet and interact with users. The response time is quick but mostly not ‘engaging’ per se.

In segments such as movies, brands were seen actually making conversation, while they entirely ignore it on Facebook. Some brands believe that conversing on Twitter is necessary while Facebook does not need engagement. This kind of thinking is quite bizarre.

Channel makes a good use of hashtags. It uses individual show hashtags, for example #Gumrah #D3 etc. It ran a contest recently with the hashtag #RunningLate which received a good response from the community.

The channel is seen making a lot of “RT if …” tweets which receive a decent response from the audience that the channel caters to. Apart from that, there are a few tweets around general trending topics such as the IPL along with sharing a few quotes.

However, on a larger scale, at the root of the problem lies the lack of content. Also, a majority of the strategy is not focused and the tweets made are just at random, while they should consider sharing episode summaries or videos. Also, since Channel is inherently a music channel, there can be conversation around that as well.

Recently, the channel conducted a hangout on Google+ and asked users to tweet their questions on Twitter. This was an interesting way of generating interaction. Brands mostly have Twitter chats with stars and celebrities, but getting them to talk through video is a great way to overwhelm your audience.

Channel on YouTube

The YouTube activity of the channel is centred around 5 minute snippets from previously telecast episodes of Channel shows and promos for the same. In terms of activity and frequency, the uploads are actively made with the summarising video going up shortly after the episode’s broadcast. All these are decently placed in separate playlists for each show and coupled with self explanatory written descriptions.

Apart from video summaries of the episodes, there are promos of forthcoming shows which are also promoted well.

Conclusion

Overall, the channel can improve their social media strategy. They can make much better use of Facebook applications and get innovative with their campaigns on social platforms. YouTube can be used very creatively to increase viewership by taking fans behind the screen with the use of exclusive videos.