Finding Your Roots & McGee Media
As the first social media producer for Finding Your Roots I came into experiment and extend audience reach. I brought a fresh eye to the team by creating new campaigns, content, and using innovative strategies to increase engagement. Below are some examples of our successful social media moments during season 8:
01
Creating Campaigns
This campaign catered to the heart of the show as genealogy is a huge aspect of finding your roots. This campaign consisted of a 3-day countdown on Tik Tok with different DNA cousin reveals leading up to the big compilation on Genealogy Day!
Other campaigns included: Black History Month, St.Patrick's Day, The Oscars, Ask A Genealogist, April Fool's Day etc.
Tik Tok: 257K views, Instagram: 174.5K Reach , Facebook Reach Total: 426.8K, Total Reach: 858K
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Geneaolgy Day
02
Incorporating Instagram Reels & Techniques
Using new techniques and tools for specific platforms is a great way to increase engagement online. Knowing that the feature "reels" was supported heavily by Instagram's algorithm I reformatted these amazing clips to 9:16 to enforce more views. On top of this feature since celebrities are our main subjects using the collaborator tool was very effective. Notably, Terry Crews has 8M followers on Instagram so collaborating on a post would get more eyes on it. Terry Crews collaborated with us on two videos helping over 400K+ people to view our reels!
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CZsFJCjgn8A/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
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03
Building A Tik Tok Audience
With the show's demographic ranging from 35-65+ catering content for an app popular with Gen Z seemed like a difficult task. While our presence started out slow learning the rhythms of the app helped us gain over 20k+ in two months. Some strategies we had were cross-pollination from our established platforms telling our fans to check our our Tik Tok page for exclusive content. We also used the two-part method, and shortening video duration to increase our viewer duration. Lastly carefully selecting guests that had niche followings on the platform such as Andy Cohen, Marisa Tomei, & Kathryn Hahn proved to be beneficial.
04
Eliminating the Barrier Between TV & the Audience
In a simple way to gain fans' attention creating behind-the-scenes content proved to be an easy way to gain social success. Shows who have a big following need to take advantage of the exclusive access they can give their audience. Most people who watch the show want to be on the show. Giving the audience a chance to feel like our host, Henry Louis Gates is giving them a personal "Thank You" proved to be a hit! The video on all platforms was successful bringing in over 200K+ views and some of the highest engagement seen all season!
