CASE STUDY
BBC THE ARCHERS
Liberty842 managed The Archers’ social media channels for 5 years between 2009 and 2014. Our online audience engagement, content development and analysis gave the programme-makers a fantastic and real-time insight into the show’s online audience.
For The Archers, our strategy was to champion the audience, and to reach new listeners through social media. Many listeners are highly creative and humour is extremely important to the social conversation. We encouraged fan fiction at which The Archers listeners excelled.
The SAVE campaign fought against a new road through the fictional village of Ambridge: listeners generated slogans for the campaign and Liberty842 immortalised them for social media.
Twitter provided a brilliant place to encourage new listeners to The Archers. We used Twitter effectively to spot and engage with those interested in the programme, and to capitalise on listeners’ social networks.
The consistent promotion of #thearchers hashtag on Twiter has helped to broaden the show’s audience by intriguing non listeners, and encouraging many to get involved in talking about The Archers online.
Through Facebook, Twitter and the programme’s blog, we offered fans of the show a mix of insight into the workings of the show as well as interviews with the cast, live Q&As and fun visuals with a focus on generating further debate and conversation.
Susan Carter visits local hair salon, Fabrice of Felpersham. Liberty842 created visuals for The Archers’ social media to accompany storylines.
Liberty842 developed new content that moved away from using cast images (which many listeners hated), and highlighted the quality of writing on the programme, visualising quotes from characters. We also created flyers, posters and invitations to events in the village, helping to engage fans in life in Ambridge. We choose events that were most likely to be engaged with and shared on social media.
Over 5 years, we saw a continual and steady rise in engagement, reach and follower numbers on social media.
