Pop Culture Perfection: HootSuite Unites the Social Thrones

While the average social media user may not view their social networks as warring kingdoms, HootSuite used a high-quality, timely video and a well-researched infographic to outline the current relationships and recent skirmishes of your favourite social networks, capping it off with the powerful call to action “Unite Your Social Kingdoms” with HootSuite. HootSuite links viewers back to a larger infographic, outlining the recent battles between the social networks they connect. All of this links back to HootSuite’s major call to action – social media winter is coming, the major houses are gearing up for battle, and only HootSuite’s owls can carry messages seamlessly between them. By using video as a ‘trailer’ to link back to their infographic and landing page, they took advantage of the social search and sharing power of YouTube to build awareness for their other content. HootSuite took advantage of the social buzz around the premier to launch a highly topical video, and used a powerful call to action – Unite Your Social Thrones – to drive awareness about their platform. Their YouTube videos take advantage of high-quality annotations to drive viewers back to their landing page: This saves viewers from being tempted into related content on YouTube, and gives everyone a clear next step – Unite Your Social Kingdoms with the HootSuite’s social management platform. This landing page is also linked from the description in the YouTube video, meaning viewers who are looking for more information are offered the opportunity to sign up for a HootSuite account, or see why the brand made the video. YouTube is a powerful distribution source for your video content, but make no mistake – House YouTube wants nothing more than to keep your viewers on YouTube. The Game of Thrones themed campaign around Uniting Your Social Networks was well timed, and a cross-platform distribution strategy involving video, infographics, a social media strategy, and a targeted landing page allowed HootSuite to effectively push their platform alongside the launch of Game of Thrones Season 4. It’s worth noting that HootSuite wasn’t promoting a new feature, or even a new development to their platform.

Source: Vidyard

As millions of television fans were gearing up for the launch of the fourth season of Game of Thrones, the team at HootSuite was busy preparing an amazing video marketing campaign.

Corporate attempts to capitalize on trendy media are hit-or-miss, and with a fandom as passionate and devoted as Game of Thrones, HootSuite had to tread lightly and get all the details right. There’s a lot of amazing parts to this video, and I want to look at a few of them specifically:

The Trend: Using Video as a Trailer

Game of Thrones has an iconic opening cinematic that plays at the start of each episode. Fans of the show will recognize the music immediately, and HootSuite did a fantastic job re-creating the opening scenes depicting each social network as a clockwork kingdom rising from the land, with HootSuite as the continent connecting them all.

The most amazing part of this video is that it serves the larger purpose of promoting viewers to view the associated infographic. HootSuite links viewers back to a larger infographic, outlining the recent battles between the social networks they connect. From Twitter disabling inline access to Instagram images in 2012 (thus limiting Facebook’s power) to Facebook blocking Vine, the infographic gives readers a great breakdown of the current landscape of social media, and summarizes the different ‘Houses’ with major stats, hilarious mottos, and valuable facts.

All of this links back to HootSuite’s major call to action – social media winter is coming, the major houses are gearing up for battle, and only HootSuite’s owls can carry messages seamlessly between them. Pretty powerful imagery and it all relates back to their TV theme:

The bottom line is, while video content marketing is definitely central to this campaign, it’s not the only content piece HootSuite created. By using video as a ‘trailer’ to link back to their infographic and landing page, they took advantage of the social search and sharing power of YouTube to build awareness for their other content.