YouTube – The Behenji

After drafts and drafts and some head-smacking and then more drafts, 3 out of 7 scripts were selected for the first season of our webseries. All of them were super Singaporean oriented, with a slice of kooky and a dash of ‘wait, what?’ as they progressively get weirder with every click.

My team of writers and I finalized three webisodes which you can view here:

Being a marketing queen, I took the reigns and galloped to the most influential social media platform: Facebook.

Despite the hardwork put into the story, characters, dialogues and production value, a webseries isn’t a webseries unless it’s been marketed properly on the web. One would think that such a thing would be easy, I mean ‘what doesn’t go viral these days?’ but the reality is quite an eye opener.

I want to tell you about my journey of getting this little new, colourful kite of a Webseries off the ground and into mid-air.

Day 1: A pretty ‘big’ announcement was made before the filming of the first webisode:

What do you think about the engagement? Pretty tight for a first day where 190 people liked it within the first 20 hours. In fact our page likes practically sky rocketed:

In just about a week, our fans doubled without any posts of our content at this point.

All I was posting were pictures of what was happening behind the scenes of our set. Again, people didn’t know what our show looked like or what the tone was going to be like.

The numbers were climbing as I prepped our growing audience members, by introducing them to the set, as if they were a part of it from the very start.

And then BHAM!

This was the secret. Have more than one person in a picture, tag everyone (so that it appears on their walls, duh) and watch the magic unfold. More importantly, have something that makes a point. As you can see in this image; there are 4 females. All of them have really important roles to play on set; something which you don’t see in Hollywood- we have a D.P, a Producer/A.D and Director who are all women. What’s even better is that the script we were shooting that day was also written by a female writer. This caught people’s attention and got them clicking.

After the high, I then decided to pepper the page with little promotional teaser-posters:

And little clues about what our show was focused on:

You can probably guess that there’s something brewing about McConaughey in our show. And yeah, you’re right. We’re just as obsessed about him as the world is and we’re not ashamed.

Anyway, you can probably notice some different details in the posts. Some of them were posted by ‘PostPlanner‘. It’s sort of like Buffer but it’s strictly a Facebook app that predicts and performs for you, based on any patterns it notices on your page. After using PostPlanner, I would personally recommend using Buffer, since seems more transparent and user friendly.

Working on Twitter helped, secondary to scheduling posts through Facebook Apps. What really is important here, is to catch onto a forum where your project can be talked about automatically:

In fact, the Twitter account has been growing at an alright rate, someone who hasn’t actually tweeted actively at all. I had almost 900 tweets automatically generated for us by Weeder – a pretty cool site to select what areas/subjects of interest you would like your tweets to be sourced from and sent out to your followers. This was a good way of getting people on our page and now that we’re almost leveling out our number of followers with those we follow, it’s a good time to cool off Weeder (by adjusting the number and frequency of posts each day) and pushing our own, original content and voice forward.

What also caught people’s fancies in a light-hearted way, was our McConaughey/True Detective memes:

And so far we’ve been doing great:

I have had no crazy dips so far. Phew!

Oh and yes, we’re one of those pages that do better at midnight (according to Singapore Standard Time):

I choose that time slot, because it keeps the time zones of US (New York- 12pm, LA -9am), India (9:30pm) and Melbourne (2am) on one sort of plateau, when people are generally online scrolling. These regions have the most active mobile users in the world and it was very important for me to focus on this sample of potential, prime audiences.

The next beast I tried to tackle is Reddit.