To get fans buzzing about the summer 2013 finale of Pretty Little Liars, we created a multi-platform social media campaign called #WorldWarA. The campaign kicked off with an on-air promo that aired three weeks before the finale telling fans to prepare themselves for the biggest bombshell in Pretty Little Liars history—#WorldWarA. The hashtag was featured prominently throughout the promo. Across all of the Pretty Little Liars social media platforms, we messaged the fact that this reveal would be bigger than anything fans had ever seen before. We created shareable countdown graphics featuring the 10 biggest reveals in PLL history, and posted them across all platforms. On the final day—the day of the summer finale—we posted a mysterious photo of a shadowy figure and told people to tune-in in order to see the biggest reveal yet. After previous big reveals on the show, we noticed a trend among fans in the social media space—they loved sharing photos of their reactions. To capitalize on this organic trend during the #WorldWarA episode, we ran an on-air snipe telling fans to get ready to tweet their reaction photos around the big #WorldWarA reveal for a chance to have their photo featured in a digital mosaic on the Pretty Little Liars Facebook page. Finally, when the beloved character named Ezra was revealed to be the evil character A, we saw an explosion in the social media space with scores of fans tweeting their reaction photos using #PLLReaction. Each photo was pulled into the digital mosaic that formed an image of Ezra. The buzz around the episode continued for days. 24 hours after the reveal, Pretty Little Liars and Ezra is A was still trending on Twitter! Due to our #WorldWarA campaign, the social media buzz for the finale was monumental. Pretty Little Liars began trending on Twitter the night before the finale aired, and continued to trend throughout the day leading up to the broadcast. Our campaign led to the summer finale of Pretty Little Liars becoming the most tweeted episode of television in TELEVISION HISTORY with a record 1.9 million tweets—a record that still stands today. Ratings were huge as well, with tune-in always the ultimate goal of our social media campaigns. The summer finale of Pretty Little Liars became the #1 telecast in ABC Family history in target 18-34s/12-34s and Women 18-49.
