Pretty Little Liars is known for generating a lot of social media buzz but we needed to take it to the next level when promoting the summer finale of Pretty Little Liars in August 2012. We announced that someone on the show was going to be revealed as being “guilty of the ultimate betrayal." To drive excitement for this episode, we created an integrated on-air/online campaign called #TheBetrAyal to get fans talking about who would be revealed as the betrayer in the summer finale. The center piece of this campaign was #TheBetrAyal Suspect Tracker" App.The summer finale of Pretty Little Liars became the #1 “most social" TV series episode in history, breaking records with over 1.6 million comments according to SocialGuide The buzz began growing three weeks before the finale date when we launched #TheBetrAyal campaign. Our on-air promo campaign teased that someone was going to betray everyone else in the summer finale episode. The hashtag #TheBetrAyal was featured in the spot. At the same time, we launched “#TheBetrAyal Suspect Tracker", an App which lived on Facebook and abcfamily.com. We narrowed down “The Betrayer" list to 12 suspects and encouraged fans to tweet their vote for who was guilty of the ultimate betrayal. The order of the suspects updated in real time based on votes. Hundreds of thousands fans checked out the App. Talent and journalists tweeted their votes as well, helping to fuel the buzz! We included the hashtag in our tweets from our Pretty Little Liars handle. #TheBetrAyal campaign drove massive buzz leading up to the finale and during the finale, buzz reached a peak of 36,000 tweets per minute. And most importantly this buzz helped fuel ratings. Pretty Little Liars hit Season 3 highs in nearly all key demos including Total Viewers, standing as the show’s most-watched summer finale on record.
