Pop culture trends and memes have a very short shelf life. Entertainment brands want to play within this highly engaged space, but dangers abound when they force themselves into conversations. Who wants to be dismissed as cringe or fake?
Prime Video wanted a way for their social feeds to be as consistently entertaining and surprising as they are in their offerings – to reinforce the pop culture expectations and enthusiasm fans already had for the brand. The best pop culture social accounts know who they are, what fans want, and how to weigh into the daily cultural give and take. Prime Video already has the most entertaining content – and now needed to flex their zeitgeist commentary chops, seeking daily opportunities to react with speed, nimbleness, and authenticity.
Beyond growing engagement, followers, and brand loyalty, Amazon Prime woke up each day seeking an additional goal – is today another chance to win the internet?
In order to play within the reactive content battle space, being a meme warrior or pop culture nerd isn’t a requirement, but sure helps. The Prime Video reactive team of creatives and strategists were already obsessive fans themselves, deeply entrenched in the daily running conversations about entertainment and pop culture. This gives our feed creators an intuitive sense of how to jump in and shape trending fandom conversations. This nimble advantage allows us to consistently respond faster than competitors who operate on data analysis. Often, by the time the quants have spotted a trend and crunched the data of who/how engagement was being created, the moment to respond already expired. This reactive team is built to apply insights at speed.
Our reactive strategy has imbued Prime Video’s social feeds with a persona that followers have come to know and love: we’re entertainment obsessed, queer friendly and celebratory of diversity in race, ethnicity, and ability. We’re unafraid to get a little edgy, and we’re equal parts nostalgic and contemporary. We love being judged by fan reactions and replies, and are in awe of fan retweets and remixes inspired by our content. We know we’ve struck gold when fans begin riffing with us, developing a relationship with Prime Video and learning what we’re into. We’re not just the media company selling them their favorite titles; we’re deep within the social conversations of fans. Thirsting and entertaining wacky theories and following relevant pop culture stories.
In 2022, we hopped on trending moments with reactive content across Instagram and Twitter 547 times over the past twelve months, highlights include:
Our reactive content response across Instagram and Twitter 547 times produced a total of 222M impressions, 8M total engagements and 7M views. Reactive content is the second most engaged content format on Instagram driving average engagements per post of 79,496.
On Twitter, we made 466 reactive posts (20% of all tweets) which received an engagement rate of 2x the channel goal (1.13% vs 0.60% goal). Reactive content drove 1.9M engagements, 25% of total engagements for the year on Twitter.
Connecting with mass audiences through unplanned, bespoke content at the right moment in time is a difficult dance of coordination, speed and creativity. This reactive content not only drives social conversation through cultural impact across Prime Video social feeds, but it fosters a devoted fandom that evangelizes entertainment enthusiasts around Prime Video IPs.
