Traditional and digital media platforms are challenged to create engaging, relevant content that keeps audiences hooked for longer. With audience attention-spans fading, production teams must exploit key tactics to create incredible audience engagement and maximise organic reach in their live content.
Here are four surefire ways production teams can enhance their live content and overall content strategy:
1. Create an Emotional Response
Drive conversations from content that evokes a feeling and makes viewers want to react and get onto social media to share. Drama shows and sports have a massive emotional driver attached to them.
The best approach is running social media in parallel with the show. As the narrative develops on screen, your community management team can post cues related to the content and motivate viewers to respond with images, videos, and messages, sharing their anger, sympathy, happiness, or distaste via social media. This actively generates user-generated content (UGC) that naturally boosts organic reach as viewers share their reaction to their networks.
2. Make Opinions Count (Interactive Media)
This revolves around talk shows, news, and lifestyle programming predominantly. Talk about a hot topic, celeb trend, or a political argument during your show and create a call to action for viewers to get involved.
Run live polls to gauge opinion and include the results within your live programming. Viewers will engage and share opinion, which in turn will motivate others to join the conversation. Successful producers know exactly what people want to talk about, so research online hot topics and jump onto the conversation to leverage this form of interactive media. This shared act of voting or commenting is a powerful driver of organic reach.
3. Prompt Nostalgia to Drive Organic Sharing
This is ideal for lifestyle and documentaries that look at past events—historical, sporting, or political. Activating your viewer’s memories is a great driver for engagement because they’ll relate to past experiences or have a link to a historical event from a family member.
- Example: Leading up to Wimbledon, run a classic replay show. Reach a wider audience by posting clips on social using a hashtag (e.g., #JoinTheStory) to encourage fans to share their memories of the previous event. Producers can then use this type of UGC within their shows to engage audiences and create a powerful content strategy that extends organic reach.
4. Making Shared Experiences
Finally, boost engagement through shared experiences. Live events are the ideal situation where everyone wants to get involved—the more the merrier. Individuals and groups are highly likely to get involved and show off their parties or viewing setups on social media.
Producers can capitalise on this by bringing that UGC into the live coverage—featuring videos and images of fans sharing their love for the event. This creates a much more communal experience for everyone watching, giving an on-screen engagement payoff to the viewer, which in turn motivates more viewers to share their own experiences and maximise organic reach.
No One-Size-Fits-All Approach
There isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach for social engagement across every TV genre. However, by applying these four drivers to the DNA of your show, you can determine if social interaction should be part of your content strategy. The key is that social engagement should always enhance a viewer’s experience, ensuring the social content works in tandem with the main live broadcast to keep the audience engrossed and engaged.
- Tags: Broadcasters, Gaming, Sports
