Executive Summary
Campaign Overview- The goals in the campaign are to become more appealing to younger generations, gain more international viewers, and raise follower percentage.
KPI and Forecasts- On Instagram, the indicators of success would be continuing to gain followers and using Reels. The company can also diversify posts on Twitter and use more humor to increase likes and engagement. They should also continue using TikTok because that is a great way to connect with the target audience for the campaign, which is Gen Z.
Conclusion- Netflix is doing a great job with social media and can continue doing many of the things already in place, while maybe incorporating a few minor changes to really use each platform to its full advantage.
Future Recommendations- Netflix has some minor changes with hashtags and cohesiveness that can really make a huge difference. The competition is coming in strong and Netflix just has to continue pushing the boundaries and keeping with the trends to stay in the top spot.
Client Overview
Netflix, Headquartered in Los Gatos, California
Netflix has a little over 12,000 employees. According to Statista, 9,400 of these employees were full-time in 2020. The data on total employees and temporary employees stops in 2017. The number of employees has been steadily increasing since 2015.
Netflix offers streaming movies and TV shows. They are one of the most popular providers and had around 208 million subscribers as of April 2021. Netflix started as a DVD subscription service and at the time was the biggest rival to Blockbuster. They then began adding streaming services and soon became strictly online only.
Netflix is 23 years old. It was founded on August 29, 1997.
Netflix has one website and the URL is https://www.netflix.com/
Netflix has social media accounts on every platform. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and TikTok
Netflix has a very strong company presence in the United States and Canada. They are the top streaming service, with Amazon Prime Video ranking second. In 2019, there are a few articles talking about how the company was expanding into more international territories. They were
opening new offices and production centers in places such as Amsterdam, Paris, Berlin, Sydney, and Spain. This is important because the company may be looking to begin telling more stories from other countries, giving them a huge opportunity to possibly gain more international subscribers and increase their presence worldwide.
Source: https://variety.com/2019/biz/news/netflix-international-territories-1203395845/
One interesting thing I found while researching data was that it was projected that Disney Plus, which launched in 2018, could surpass Netflix in subscriber numbers by 2026. This means that Netflix really has to make sure they are creating content and growing their reach to keep their position as the top streaming service.
Source: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1052770/global-svod-subscriber-count-by platform/
Market Analysis
The majority of current customers are either in the 25-34 age group or the 35-44 age group. According to an article on the Business of Apps website, 25 to 34 year olds were the dominant group in 2015. However, studies show that as of 2017 35 to 44 year olds now dominated. The change is thought to be a shift toward the age of users being more reflective of the general populace. I wonder if it’s also possible here that some people who were surveyed did fall in the under-25 age range in 2015, but then were over that age in 2017. The same could have been true for some people in the 35 to 44 group. This could have possibly skewed the data a bit.
Current competitors are Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, HBO Max, and Disney Plus. Disney Plus seems to be doing a really good job with social media where their content feels like it has a theme. Even when you look at the Disney Plus Instagram profile, they have titles on their content so it’s easy to know what that video may be about.
For a while, the streaming industry was very undersaturated with the only company being Netflix. However, in the last few years, many companies have started to launch their own streaming services. Now there are around 20 different streaming services, with more channels come out with their own all the time. The market has become so oversaturated in recent years that it has become harder for people to decide which services they want to pay for. Streaming services started as a way to let people conveniently watch TV and movies when they had the time. The progression of the industry has ultimately turned that convenience back into cable. The streaming industry also had a huge increase in subscribers in 2020 due to the pandemic, which probably sped up certain aspects of the industry’s growth.
According to the Consumer Technology Association, total spending in the streaming industry is projected to reach $112 billion in 2021. Statista reports that Netflix spent $17.3 billion in 2020 and is projected to spend another $17 billion in 2021. There was a breakdown of spending for companies in 2019 showing that Netflix spending has gone up since then. Sources: https://www.statista.com/statistics/707302/netflix-video-content-budget/ https://www.statista.com/chart/13076/video-content-spending/
Netflix was one of the first streaming services to appear on the market. This allowed for them to have a huge advantage over newer services that are just starting out in the market. When Blockbuster was still their biggest competitor, they found a way to be unique and create something that the more established company wasn’t doing already. Netflix was special because they would send movies straight to people’s houses, making the experience easy and hassle-free. There was no need to go to the store and search for hours to find which movie you wanted. Now you had the option to go on your computer and find what you wanted in the comfort of your own home. Then you would just wait for it to show up, watch it, and send it
back. This helped differentiate Netflix and made them stand out in the industry. Soon, they began adding certain movies on their website, which people could then view immediately. Once other companies realized this was the start of a new industry, they began to join in on streaming.
The only seasonality would be certain movies and shows that are related to holidays. For example, around Halloween you can find more scary movies and cult classics added. Then during Christmas, there are a lot of romantic holiday movies, both favorites and Netflix originals, added every year. It seems that Netflix is starting to rival companies like Hallmark and Lifetime which are known for their Christmas movies.
Current Market
Netflix doesn’t use social media for customer service. On Instagram, they are not very active with followers and I wasn’t able to find any responses from them in the comments. On Twitter, they were a bit more responsive, but they mainly just added on to other jokes.
Netflix does a decent job with social media. They get a lot of engagement and consistently have between 100,000 to over 1,000,000 likes and 200+ comments. However, their social media does feel a bit all over the place, which makes sense because they have a lot of different shows. But, I feel like they could do a better job of making things less busy and more cohesive. They could use one font on their videos and have the Netflix logo on each. This would give all the content the same feel and viewers would know what to expect. The other change that could be made is varying the content across platforms. Netflix posts a lot of the same content across multiple platforms, which can be boring for followers. Of course, once in a while, there may be an important announcement that should be posted across all to make sure it is seen by everyone. Otherwise, everyday content should be different to account for what performs better on each platform.
Netflix has 27 million followers on Instagram, 11.7 million followers on Twitter, and almost 75 million likes on Facebook. They post content multiple times a day.
According to similarweb, Netflix had 2.23 billion visitors to their website in the past 6 months. 90% of these visitors were direct and 7.54% coming from search. This shows that Netflix has a higher than average click-through rate on Google search, according to our lecture slides where the arts and entertainment row had an average of 5.86%. Only 0.79% came from social, which shows that most people follow social more to keep up to date with their favorite shows and not to click through to watch.
Source: https://www.similarweb.com/website/netflix.com/
Conclusion
The current social media content aligns pretty well with Netflix’s business strategy. They know that most people following them on social already have some kind of connection to the company, so they don’t have to promote subscribing as much as some other companies do. They post more content about shows than anything else, which gets a lot of engagement. The photos and videos used could be cleaned up a bit and given a more overall cohesive look.
Proposed Social Media Strategy
For now, Netflix’s social media strategy is strong. However, other companies in the industry seem to be growing faster than Netflix when it comes to follower rates on Instagram. The goal should be to get younger generations, who are becoming old enough to have a Netflix subscription, to follow on social media and subscribe. Netflix also does pretty well in the US, but they have fewer followers and engagement on some of their international social media platforms. Source: https://www.socialinsider.io/blog/netflix-social-media-strategy/
Netflix has a slightly higher than average engagement rate on Instagram for the entertainment industry.
Source: https://www.rivaliq.com/blog/social-media-industry-benchmark-report/#title-all industry
The company should continue to focus on Instagram/Reels and TikTok to engage with younger generations that are beginning to decide on their own streaming services. Many of the younger generations may not see Netflix as a must-have service like previous generations did, so convincing them it is will be important to future growth. Video is also one of the most popular forms of social media and does a lot better with engagement. Many of the younger generations are watching videos more than anything else. If Netflix could create some interesting content for YouTube that would intrigue the younger generations this could also help with growth and new potential customers. YouTube is the biggest platform for people in the under 20 age group, and even in the 20-29 age group it is the second highest.
Source: https://www.ypulse.com/article/2021/01/25/the-ranking-of-gen-z-millennials-favorite video-streaming-services-is-full-of-surprises/
https://www.socialinsider.io/blog/netflix-social-media-strategy/
The target audience would be young adults under the age of 25. Getting the international audience more invested is definitely another big step for growth, so another target audience could be international.
Netflix doesn’t use hashtags very often, which may be hurting them a bit. They tag people and journalistic organizations when talking about features, but they don’t hashtag the same things as well. This could help them reach more people who are searching for those key terms. People know of Netflix, but maybe they don’t know that there is a show perfect for what they want to watch. Using these hashtags would help someone find a show they otherwise may have missed. For example, using #strangerthings along with #sci-fi and #drama could tell someone what the show is about and possibly pique their interest.
This post makes it clear what the picture is about and also gives context to the show. This helps if someone has maybe read the book but hasn’t seen the actor before. It also clearly signals that this post is from Netflix. The caption would have an interesting quote just like in the original post on their social media already. They also did a good job tagging important people such as Collider, Ben Barnes, and the photographer. Finally, adding a couple of hashtags to help gain more views and give more context around what the show is about. They could also include #netflix. Although this post can do well on Instagram with the new visuals, it may be better for Twitter since that platform allows easier linking to external websites. This type of visual could be used for most of the posts though giving context and a cleaner feel throughout their profile.
Their engagement rate on Twitter is pretty low so getting that up a bit could be a good measure of success. Humor does seem to do well with Netflix’s community so they can continue that on Twitter more than Instagram. This could help grow the engagement rate. Instagram is more about visuals so cleaning those up and making them look nice could help with more likes. On Instagram, the proposed metric for success would be to get even more engagement than usual or to boost follower gain percentage.
Twitter Statistics (Source: https://www.socialinsider.io/blog/netflix-social-media-strategy/)
The only budget requirement would possibly be paying for employees to create the content. Ultimately, companies can post on social media for free unless they want to do sponsored content. This means that Netflix could spend very little and still see great results.
If the campaign did well, the ROI could be very high because they would not only make money, but they could also gain new followers and viewers from the next generation who will be return members. Many people renew their subscriptions for streaming services they like, so if Netflix can keep them interested they would see a huge ROI.
Campaign Overview
The goal is to increase follower gain percent on Instagram, increase engagement on Twitter, and appeal to both younger and international audiences more. You want to pick dates that have National or International holidays and can be tied back to certain content on the platform. One of the other big things to appeal to more of the younger generation is to continue using humor in video form. These types of videos see more views and more engagement in general. Netflix seems to do a good job of this already on social media and can use this to their advantage when switching over to more video content. The other thing would be to clean up their Instagram pictures and give them a more cohesive look. This could be done very easily with planned cover photos and text overlays telling people what the video was about if scrolling through their profile. Monitoring the campaign could happen throughout and Netflix could also try A/B testing some of the content to see what performs better.
Evolution of Campaign Strategy
Changes can be made based on announcements that come up and need to be posted, or if it seems that something is performing poorly compared to previous posts. By talking through anything that seems to be going wrong, Netflix could decide to make some changes. If something didn’t work as well as it did before, then they could potentially switch back to doing it the old way. For example, if people were saying that the hashtags weren’t working, they could go back to posting captions without or posting the hashtags somewhere else where they
were less visible. Netflix could then see if this made the performance go back up or if it stayed the same, which would help to know if the hashtags were actually the problem or not. The other changes that could happen are if a new show comes out and unexpectedly does really well, which could possibly lead to wanting to make more content from that instead of content that was already planned.
Any changes will affect the campaign because the more factors that could increase or decrease engagement and followers, the harder it is to have a definitive cause and effect when looking at the data. Maybe you get a huge spike from something that you are doing well in the campaign,
but then you change a few other things and now people aren’t engaging as much. It would be hard to know why that is happening, whereas if you only change one thing at a time you would be able to more easily pinpoint what the issue is.
Key Results
It’s hard to come up with possible results for Netflix because there isn’t a lot of data around their social media analytics. However, I did find an article stating that their subscriber numbers have been decreasing a bit now that people are starting to go out more as the pandemic becomes more manageable. This could be a similar trend on their social media. Other companies have a higher follower percentage, but it seems that minor changes could make a big difference with Netflix. They are the most well-known in the industry and have been around the longest, giving them a huge advantage. However, getting the younger generation and international could be just the amount of growth they need to stay ahead of the competition. Source: https://www.reuters.com/business/media-telecom/netflix-misses-expectations quarterly-paid-subscriber-additions-2021-04-20/
Conclusion
Netflix is doing a great job with their social media strategy. They have a lot of reach and engagement and a lot of potential to continue to build on that. Key audiences to bring in would be Gen Z and International. This would give them a good boost that they need to keep the top spot in the industry. At the rate they’re going now, it is possible that Disney Plus or Amazon Prime Video could catch up and even surpass Netflix in the next few years. Keeping their content unique by continuing to use humor and increasing video content will help them stay relevant. Their engagement rate on Instagram is a bit low compared to Disney Plus, even though Netflix gets more likes. This can be raised by making content thumbnails clear about what someone can expect in each video. That way people scrolling through can click on more things and raise engagement. Also, their follower percentage is lower than most of the other big streaming services. Raising this could be a good indicator of people being more interested in what Netflix is posting and wanting to make sure they’re following the company for important updates.
Future Recommendations
I think Netflix can continue doing what they are currently doing, but still making sure to keep up with trends and making things a bit more polished. Netflix has good engagement, but they shouldn’t disregard the competition because they could end up being surpassed. Netflix has
been known to be ahead of the curve in the streaming industry. They saw where they could be unique during each phase of growth, and I think taking a unique approach to social media could keep people invested.
Learning Component
I really wanted to learn exactly what it takes to set up a campaign and the important things you need to think about when getting started. This really helped me to see just how much information you have to gather before even starting to plan out the content itself. I also think there is a lot to be told in data, but trying to interpret it sometimes takes a while. Depending if you are doing social media for a more established company or a newer one, finding data may be hard. If you’re just starting out with a newer company, you may not have anything to compare to just yet. This could be tough to know if things are working or how to improve. Once you get the data though, you have to make sure you’re interpreting it correctly or you could end up making content that doesn’t relate to the audience.
In the future, I think it would be easier to set the important metrics and goals since I’ll know what each data point means and what to be looking at more. Sometimes there is a lot of data that may not be super helpful and knowing how to weed that out is something that will definitely help streamline things. I also think that having data for a company you’re working for is easier than doing it from the outside. When you have more access to internal data you can make more informed decisions. This could change the recommendations and success metrics that you choose to create your campaign around.