To get fans buzzing about the summer 2014 finale of Pretty Little Liars, we created a multi-platform social media campaign called PLL #FatAlFinale. The campaign kicked off with on-air promos that aired three weeks out before the finale telling fans to get ready for the biggest shock in Pretty Little Liars history—a main character's death. The hashtag #FatAlFinale was featured prominently throughout the promo. Across all of the Pretty Little Liars social media platforms, we messaged to the fans that this shocking moment would be bigger than anything fans had ever seen before. We created shareable countdown graphics featuring all of the characters asking fans which character they think will be murdered, and posted them across all platforms.To capitalize on the organic trend of fans tweeting during the episode, we ran an on-air snipe telling fans to tweet #RIPMona once it was revealed that she was dead. Fans were prompted to keep tweeting and visit PLLreaction.com to track their progress to unlock actress Janel Parrish's reaction to dying on the show. Once #RIPMona was tweeted 50,000 times, Janel's reaction video was unlocked. We saw an explosion in the social media space with scores of fans tweeting #RIPMona in order to see Janel's video. The buzz around the episode continued for days. 24 hours after the reveal, #RIPMona was still trending on Twitter!
Due to our #RIPMona 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. #RIPMona generated 339,000 tweets, including more than 200,000 tweets between 9pm and 10pm. This made it the fastest-growing and biggest episode specific hashtag Pretty Little Liars has ever seen. Our campaign led to the summer finale of Pretty Little Liars becoming the most second most tweeted episode of television that season with a record 890,945 million tweets—only behind the premiere which is at #1 with 1,046,459 tweets. Ratings were strong as well, with tune-in always the ultimate goal of our social media campaigns.
