The Snowball Effect of Social Media Tune-in and Interaction

Between 60-70% of your audience consume video content and other live broadcasts with a second screen device in their hand (be that a phone, tablet or laptop).

Tune-in is a simple concept that takes advantage of this second screen device, helping you to draw more people into your broadcast or brand and grow your audience.

In this article, we’ll be looking at how tune-in works, what the business benefits are, and what you can do to boost your tune-in rates across your content/messaging.

Our experts have put together everything you need to know about social media tune-in, so let’s get started!

What is social media tune-in?

Social media tune-in is the process of implementing engagement methodologies in your content that actively encourage current viewers to post about your content using relevant hashtags or groups. This is then seen by their friends & family, who may then join your broadcast to see what all the fuss is about.

It’s an incredibly powerful snowball effect, as the people who join your broadcast may then post, attracting more people and so on.

However, just slapping on a hashtag and hoping for the best won’t work, you need to get creative with your engagement strategy in order to give your viewers a genuinely good reason to engage with your content.

So, what can you do to encourage engagement and boost tune-in?

How to grow your audience and increase tune-in rates

The first, and most important, step is to plan out your strategy. By getting your tune-in strategy prepared well in advance of your broadcast(s), you’re ensuring a much smoother process (trust us, it never works well if you’re doing this on the fly!).

Here’s 4 key tips on growing your audience via tune-in.

1. Understand your audience

No strategy is successful without a good understanding of the audience; this is the same across every industry the world over. You need to figure out:

• What your audience wants
• What your audience needs (these two can be very different)
• Where/when your audience are consuming your content

This is, of course, easier said than done. You don’t need to know everything about your audience from the get-go, and you can actually use your audience engagement strategies to get a better feel for what they like and don’t like. You should form a solid understanding, but don’t fret if you don’t know everything.

2. Feature audience thoughts in your content

Sourcing and featuring social data using real-time engagement tools is incredibly powerful, we can’t overstate this enough!

If your presenters/hosts can actively engage with your audience’s comments, even better. Have a look at how BT Sport handle this using Dizplai’s audience engagement platform in the clip below:

Imagine you see someone tweeting about the above broadcast, you tune in to see what’s happening, and then you see the host actively engaging with that comment.

Many users on social media will also want that experience, so will join the conversation in the hopes that their comment will also be picked up & discussed, further spreading your content – you can’t ask for much better than that!

3. Use live social polls to settle topics

Everyone loves a poll, it’s a low-commitment engagement, meaning that you’re more likely to engage a much wider percentage of your audience. You may want to ask questions such as:

• Who was your man of the match?
• What do you think X should have done in Y situation?
• What new flavour should we develop next?

The possibilities are, quite literally, endless. Throw up the results on your broadcast and start a conversation using your hashtags.

More people see this and want to chime in; perfect.

4. Gamify your content

Gamification includes polls, but can also include other engagement strategies such as:

• Scorecards (fill out your scorecards & share them on socials)
• Rewards and prize draws (share this to be entered, etc.)
• Leaderboards (scoring points for certain actions to be entered into a leaderboard)

Many businesses, brands and content producers use this to great effect, successfully engaging people who would not ordinarily join in. This is usually because a prize is a tantalising prospect, so get creative!

If you need help creating your tune-in and audience engagement strategy, talk to our specialists today. We’re here to advise and support you throughout.

Talk to our specialists

What industries can benefit from tune-in?

While many live content creators (traditional broadcasters, YouTubers, Twitch streamers and more) are actively benefiting from social media tune-in, there’s a whole other side to the coin.

Businesses across the world are beginning to tap into tune-in and live content to great effect; it’s a superb way to get potential customers talking about your products or services.

There is no real limit on industries who can take advantage of this – drinks brands may want to get people voting on a new bottle design; car manufacturers might want to encourage conversations around new features; football clubs may want to feature social data in their post-match analysis.

Successful tune-in campaigns boil down to a few key parts that you need to nail:

• You need to perfect your brand messaging.
• You need the right audience engagement tools.
• You’ll need to be able to source and moderate live content.
• Finally, you’ll need to be able to create dynamic graphics to display your content.

Once you’ve properly sourced, moderated and displayed your content, social interactions will naturally begin to flow, organically growing your audience and generating excitement around your brand.

Increase tune-in rates with Dizplai’s cloud data display platform

We get it, it can be a lot to take in – it may even seem a little overwhelming, but with the right tools and support, growing your audience and spreading your message can be smooth sailing.

At Dizplai, we believe that audience engagement and social tune-in are incredibly powerful tools that organisations should be taking advantage of, both in their live content and in advertising campaigns.

We work with broadcasters, brands, content creators and organisations of all shapes and sizes. If you’ve got any questions, or if you’re ready to revolutionise your engagement strategy, get in touch with our specialists today.