We’re deep into the entertainment awards season, with a bounty of trophies handed out this month. We’ve already seen some stellar entertainment social media activations to get inspired. Organizations across the industry are transforming their content strategies with talent using short-form digital media around tentpole events.
This past week’s 2023 Primetime Emmy® Awards and other awards events offered some great lessons and examples of talent-driven activity.
TV networks, streaming services, studios, production companies and more can benefit significantly from collaborating with talent around timely social-first content. Fans and audiences on mobile devices are hungry for content on awards day and after. That includes everything from the fashion looks of their favorite stars to emotional clips of winning moments and glamorous party pics.
Collecting your talent’s original behind-the-scenes digital media and sharing videos, photos and graphics with them is the best way to capitalize on awards activity and promote your content brands. Your actors and crew are your best evangelists for building audiences and fandom around your (and their) success.
Below we’ve gathered nine ways to start thinking differently about working with your talent for entertainment social media during awards season.
1) Provide Timely Branded Digital Media to Talent on Awards Day
Your talent pool wants to post their red carpet and award pics and videos in real time, in the moment, for their families, friends and fans. If they don’t have them in hand from you, they may likely resort to sharing watermarked or lower-quality images.
You can satisfy their demand for timely, high-quality photos, videos and graphics. And you can help steer the creative branding you want to convey. Give them a steady stream of approved digital media that complements the awards day activity. Or make things more playful with memes personalized for the talent, such as their reaction shots to a big win.
Personalized congratulations graphics for nominees and winners are one fast way to do this. HBO has long celebrated its many wins this way. Here, the network immediately posted a branded graphic highlighting Jennifer Coolidge’s Emmy win for her work on The White Lotus, tagging her and the show’s account for sharing.
2) Promote Your Upcoming Content Alongside Awards
Capitalize on the awards night attention focused on talent social. Give them their red-carpet photos and videos and your promo trailer videos to share with fans.
On Emmy Awards day, Abbott Elementary’s creator, executive producer and star Quinta Brunson posted the official trailer for her show’s long-awaited return for season three. She followed it shortly after with a carousel highlighting her historic Emmy win for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series.
You can also expand this promotion across your full cast, crew and partners. Awards are tentpole events for all associated creatives and entities involved, regardless of their nominations or wins. Brunson’s castmate and fellow nominee Tyler James Williams similarly posted the show’s season premiere and his Emmy red carpet appearance on the awards day.
3) Follow Their Whole Awards Season Journey Through Digital Media
Encourage talent to capture their whole awards journey from nominations to the award ceremony and parties beyond. Audiences love to get their non-produced media alongside more professionally polished content.
On awards day, fans love to see a star’s behind-the-scenes prep to get “camera ready” for the big show. Here, actress and nominee (and Gucci brand ambassador) Jessica Chastain shared with her followers her Emmy awards day experience getting ready and her Gucci dress on the red carpet.
She also posted a short video featuring behind-the-scenes production clips of her George & Tammy limited series on Showtime. She congratulated all her fellow nominees before the event. And she simultaneously promoted this series, for which she also served as an executive producer.
4) Maximize Live Event Day Mobile Content
The sports industry knows how to make the most of a live event, capturing mobile-first all-access content during pre-game and post-game festivities. For awards shows, your entertainment social media teams can take a page from the sports playbook to do the same.
Maximize a live award event by capturing real-time mobile content throughout the festivities. And distribute it immediately to your social staff and entire content ecosystem. Younger fans and audiences that consume the majority of their content on mobile platforms love these more raw, first-hand perspectives from on-air hosts and participants at live events. They can’t get them on traditional broadcast coverage. These snippets often capture lightning-in-a-bottle moments you can’t replicate.
Here, Hulu’s Instagram Stories featured program talent like Tiny Beautiful Things star Kathryn Hahn sharing her thoughts on the Emmys red carpet. The streamer also promoted FX’s The Bear (available on Hulu’s service) by highlighting Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series winner Ayo Edebiri in the press room.
The streamer’s posts smartly included plugs for its Hulu + Live TV service. And they tagged a key linear cable property Hulu airs that had a big awards night. The Bear received a chart-topping ten Emmy awards, coming off a string of other wins and nominations at the Golden Globes, Critics Choice Awards and more.
5) Promote Your Own Broadcast Talent and Programming
If your network is broadcasting an awards show, it’s also an ideal opportunity to selectively promote your own talent and programming. Promo spots within the show are a great first step. But featuring them on entertainment social media can really increase your reach. Get select shots to your social team to facilitate their subtle promotion of your stars and show slate.
Fox TV, which hosted this year’s Emmys, featured show talent presenting awards. The talent included Joel McHale from the network’s Crime Scene Kitchen and Jon Hamm from its new animated series, Grimsburg. Using hashtags and tagging the talent with their social accounts help activate them. And this activity reminds audiences to check out the stars and shows beyond event day.
6) Combine Awards With Show Production
Awards offer an excellent opportunity for talent to celebrate their wins with fans. For shows in production, give your audiences a sneak peek behind the scenes to build excitement for upcoming seasons and episodes.
At Greenfly, we see strong performance of this content showing off the production and sets of shows. That media, combined with celebratory awards, is a winning combination.
This example comes from the Hollywood Creative Alliance’s 3rd Astra TV Awards. Actors Utkarsh Ambudkar and Danielle Pinnock from Ghosts on CBS posed with their new awards last week on the set of their show, which is currently in production for their next season.
7) Tag and Collaborate With Talent and Partners and Encourage Them To Do the Same
Don’t forget to tag talent, creative staff, crew and partners in entertainment social media posts on your owned channels to gain more content exposure. This could be accomplished through an Instagram Collab to co-author posts. You could use Add Yours Stickers to amplify Stories. Or you could rely on simple social sharing or adding comments on each other’s posts.
These groups can truly enhance content promotion. They value the opportunity to tag people and show gratitude to their own staff, colleagues, partners and more. We see this every day with our own customers. Talent likes to see all their media tagged with metadata on everyone in the asset. They can tag or mention everyone attributed to it, including the photographer.
This image celebrating Warner Bros. TV’s Emmy nomination party made its way to multi-hyphenate (Ted Lasso nominee, Shrinking co-creator, and awards presenter) Brett Goldstein’s Instagram Stories during a very busy awards day. How? The studio simply tagged him in the original post, making him aware of it and prompting him to share it easily to his channel.
Ted Lasso co-creator, executive producer and star Jason Sudeikis similarly posted a clip he was tagged in from Apple TV’s Emmy post-show party portrait studio.
Note that sharing a post to Stories is often a powerful, more passive way for talent to enhance the promotion of shows and apps around awards shows. They may not want to post that often to their feed. But their Stories may provide a more accessible entry point to collaborating on entertainment social media.
8) Open Up the Content Pipes With Talent for Entertainment Social Media
Your stars are already capturing and sharing tons of awards content. This can range from selfies with their castmates and creative executives at the venue to fun moments from all the post-show parties. Work with them to get it into your system for real-time or future use to help promote your shows and brand.
At Greenfly, we’ve seen the power of collecting original content from talent. Reality TV stars are particularly collaborative, regularly working with networks and producers to create and amplify social content.
Outstanding Reality Competition Program Emmy winner RuPaul’s Drag Race had talent Malaysia Babydoll Foxx in attendance at the show — for a close-up view of the proceedings that made it to the star’s Instagram Stories and feed. The show shared the post to its own Instagram Stories for even more impact.
9) Don’t Forget About Your Creative Talent, Crews and Executives
The opportunity to showcase your programs doesn’t end with your talent in front of the camera. You have many departments for each show that help bring them to life and get honored for their work, with staffers that have large social followings.
So, remember your above-the-line and below-the-line teams and even company executives when you think about collaborating with your talent around entertainment awards. These can include designers, makeup artists, editors, writers, directors and more.
Here, Denise Wingate, costume designer for Amazon Prime’s Daisy Jones & the Six limited series, highlighted her Creative Arts Emmy win this year with a photo from her big moment and tagged the series and partner profiles.
Greenfly’s short-form content orchestration platform can help you get royalty-free digital media to your talent immediately — before they’ve left an award’s red carpet or stage. You can satisfy their demand for timely content. And you can help steer the branding or message with your approved media.
Greenfly can also help you collect original content from talent to capture their personal perspectives on all the live happenings.
We’ve helped over 300 shows and 3,000 actors see more than 100,000 social media shares and hundreds of millions of engagements.
Are you looking to boost your entertainment social media and digital content strategy around tentpole awards this year? Let us know. Our team of experts would love to help.
