Much like its social audience, Freeform is continually evolving. The Freeform brand handles recently refreshed its social persona and voice to continue to align with its target audience.
The social team’s objective was to infuse more of the style, voice, and tone into its always-on editorial style across social media.
With a diverse range of titles ranging from nostalgic holiday films during its 31 Nights of Halloween and 25 Days of Christmas Stunts to Unscripted series such as Chrissy & Dave Dine Out and Wayne Brady: The Family Remix, as well as key scripted material, the refreshed persona and content strategy needed to be adaptable for multiple genres while maintaining relatability with internet-savvy young adults.
The Freeform brand leveraged a deep dive into its aspirational audience with key attributes based on social media use, interests, and character attributes. Based on that audience, the “Hype-Up Bestie” persona evolved from the audit. This refreshed persona leaned on key voice attributes from being inclusive, passionate, encouraging, “in the know”, casual, but always smart and witty, just like a Freeform fan. The social team then worked on executing both templated and reactive content with that persona and voice guiding various content series.
The refreshed content emulated a more authentic and native approach at creating social-first content that Freeform’s audience was known to engage with. This included updated social templates and reactive content formats that tapped into trending conversations using both linear movie titles and Freeform original series IP.
Some examples include:
The new persona and content approach proved successful. Freeform succeeded in increasing Organic Video Views, Organic Engagements, and Organic Engagement Rate year-over-year, each tracking approximately 200% ahead of the year prior.
Freeform’s following also increased across social media by +22%, with TikTok seeing the largest growth at h 1.3M new followers.
Applying unique brand persona & visuals with tried-and-true trends ensured that the Freeform main social handles continued to engage and extend its social audience.