A 30-year-old TV brand turned industry leader in an established digital space of influencers and a new crop of content creators, E! News’ is the leading entertainment news brand on Instagram – with an average weekly reach of 535m against the industry average of 48.7m.
Historically, news cycles have been the driving force of a successful social month for us – awards shows, celebrity surprise marriages, and drama. The dilemma we constantly face is: how do we maintain presence and engagement during a slow news cycle when our brand is all about news? After seeing consistent downturn around holidays, weekends, and quiet news days – a major impact on our owned and operated site visits and subsequent ad revenue -- we had to come up with a creative and scalable on-brand approach.
The goal was to maintain a consistent posting cadence, clicks per post and clicks back to site using link in bio during quiet months as we do during peak event months (such as awards season) now that Instagram has become such a key component to the brand’s storytelling and engagement numbers.
The @enews team has combatted the slow days around holidays and weekends by creating micro-campaigns, rallying around non-urgent, and often-overlooked pop-culture events that tap primarily into nostalgia by going all-in on the day of these ‘smalliday’ events (think: The Notebook Turned 15, National Sister Day etc.). When most entertainment brands would cover these events quietly and quickly, we leaned heavily into it as the leading conversation through the day, creating original content.
The following were some of the most successful campaigns from 2020 –
#THANKFULFOR WEEK: Celebrating Thankgiving week with curated pop culture moments we are thankful for. We anticipated a slow news cycle and planned ahead of time to create a 3-day social takeover on Instagram.
Kobe Bryant’s Memorial Service:
National Teachers Day: A smalliday that we prioritized in the year that was 2020
