Pixar Social Media fosters a global community of fans, animators, creatives, film lovers, and more in a place where everyone is welcome. Our social accounts feature all things Pixar through best-in-class content that showcases exceptional art, technological innovation, powerful stories, humor, and the talented people that create these wonderful worlds for our audience to enjoy.
With an already established community, the objective in 2023 was to evolve Pixar’s brand voice on social media to attract new and younger audiences. The challenge here was to make sure our brand voice stayed true to the existing global community of passionate Pixar fans, while experimenting with new copy and content formats to reach untapped audiences.
The strategy to execute this new objective was then to develop a brand voice specifically for each social platform. So based on the user demographic of the platforms, we leaned our brand voice specifically towards Gen Z on some, others towards Millenials, and some falling in between. As the channels evolved, we always made sure that each platform had its own unique voice via the copy and provided content catered to that specific audience.
Pixar’s Threads is the platform we were the most trendy and experimental on. This was a place where the brand voice could be more casual and skew younger–targeting a GenZ audience primarily. Because the goal was to have a more relatable human voice, this became the first platform where we were able to experiment with first-person language, a first for Pixar. We were also able to jump on relevant trends quickly, such as posting about the Roman Empire trend and parodying a “Spotify Wrapped” as a way to promote Inside Out 2.
TikTok was another platform where we leaned into trends and catered to a primarily Gen Z audience. So we made sure our brand voice here sounded native to the language used on TikTok while still staying true to Pixar. To do so we leaned onto the content formats that already worked well on TikTok and created things like this Fan Cam, a CapCut style Meme, and updated our movie clips with fun captions and emojis.
X is a platform in flux, but with that in mind, we wanted to make sure it was still a place where we could have a fun brand voice and still update our audience regularly on all things Pixar, thus targeting more people. For example, this post announcing a Disney Parks update is something that particularly resonated with our millennial audience, but we also had fun jumping into larger trend conversations, such as this Gen Z-led connection between Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce, and Lightning McQueen.
Instagram was a place where we had previously found a lot of success, so the formula here was much more about enhancing the quality of our voice and content.. Knowing that a large amount of our existing global audience was on this platform, our brand voice needed to stay more polished with less trendy vocabulary while still sounding modern. One large way we did this was with the creation of crossing IP meme style posts, taking the exisiting scene captions format but updating it to include multiple movies in a way we never had before. On Lightning McQueen Day we created a refined Ka-Chow carousel for Instagram versus a more DIY style version we had on TikTok.
Finally, Facebook was a place where our brand voice was the most accessible for an older Millennial global audience. Like Instagram, our audience here was used to more refined content and social copy so we leaned into optimizing content formats they already knew and loved, with a focus on fun Pixar artwork and character photography.
After we developed and implemented this platform-specific brand voice strategy, Pixar social saw an increase of 47% in overall audience engagements by the end of 2023!
We also saw a 126% increase in followers aged 13-24 across all platforms compared to 2022, while still retaining our existing fanbase.
By leading with a platform-first brand voice strategy to guide our content, we’ve been able to achieve our objective and create meaningful connections with fans. This has helped us foster a growing community where everyone is excited, engaged, and welcome.
