MTV Brand Social’s objective in 2021 was to hone in on our brand voice across our social platforms, while making engaging content and interacting with our fans and talent on a daily basis. Our goals were to increase our following, see an increase in engagements, and solidify our place as a powerhouse brand on social media in the music and entertainment space.
In 2021, MTV Brand Social had our biggest year for audience growth and that was thanks to all of the great content we were able to create mixed with our identifiable brand voice, both of which focus on a fan-first celebration of music and pop culture. We were able to launch new breakout video series like 21 Questions for 2021 and Interview by Design, that featured fan-favorite talent like Olivia Rodrigo, Normani, and Anitta.
We continued to put a big emphasis on fan engagement across everything we do, bridging the gap between the stars we’re always posting about and the fans themselves. An example of this would be our most recent iteration of Stan Club, which poses the question, “Why do you love (insert your favorite musician’s name here)?” This year, we’ve seen a lot of love from the talent featured in these CTAs on both Twitter and Instagram, many of them calling out how special it is to see all the incredible responses from all of their fans.
We also continued to amp up our artist partnership program, where we partner with unique and talented artists that we find on social media, to help us create custom content surrounding tentpoles, holidays and heritage campaigns, and eventize the “every day.” Partnering with these artists has helped us diversify our feeds and showcase some incredible artwork from growing artists.
In addition to creating unique, identifiable content, the team spends a lot of their time in the comments section of posts, scrolling through their FYP, and replying to fans and talent every chance they get. MTV is here to support our favorite artists as both a fan and a friend. We focus on celebrating big wins, while creating meaningful connections and relationships with both the artists and the fans who love to obsess with us.
Because of our honed in voice and our dedicated audience, we’re able to broaden the scope of what we discuss and publish on our accounts to extend past just music and entertainment. Publishing content that reflects the importance of mental health, encouraging our followers to register to vote and participate in upcoming elections, and uplifting anti-hate campaigns has been a core part of what we do. We’ve developed a brand voice that doesn’t just talk to our audience, but instead talks with them. We allow for open and honest discussions with fans and talent, which is an important part in helping us all make impactful change.
MTV Brand Social had our biggest year for new follower growth ever, jumping from 93M followers across all of our social channels in 2020 to 105M followers in 2021. This was driven by large gains on Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok. We also saw high engagement when interacting with our fans on a one-to-one basis, with posts that included fan prompts totaling more than one million engagements across our accounts last year. We were able to create an identifiable brand voice across our social platforms by creating unique and engaging content, while also interacting with fans and talent.
