Sky: Social media management

Sky asked SHARE to unify 250+ social channels and multiple product streams into one engaging, coherent and company-wide brand strategy.

Setting the scene

First, we looked at the current state of Sky as it always gives us important insights into where to go next. Sky’s social channels were distributing a range of messages across a multitude of products, content types & brand updates. This resulted in an inconsistent tone of voice and audience engagement. This would be our biggest challenge. We needed to unify Sky’s voice to engage and entertain our customers in a relevant way, making them love and value the brand.

Pledging for NOFOMO (No Fear of Missing Out)

Inline with Sky’s existing proposition of ‘believe in better’, we wanted to elevate this with the social lens. If we “make social more entertaining, we make life better”. Our objective was to ensure our audiences never miss the best of Sky by providing fun and share-able content. No Missing Out became the foundation of our social strategy.

With a mix of Always On activations, individual campaigns and promotions, we would improve overall affinity & awareness of Sky and its features. Additionally, this would increase user actions that have a direct business impact (update, install, purchase). To do this, we combined the force of entertaining video content designed to inform, engage & inspire our audiences with a relentless paid activation and best-in-class community management.

Defining the friendly and entertaining face of Sky

Sky is the friend you always reach out to for the best TV recommendations. They get passionate about everything Sky, and they want to share it with you. Moreover, they know your tastes. If you want a bit of suspense or romance, they’ll find you the best shows to binge.

Our tone of voice of social needed to reflect that; inclusive, friendly, understanding and pro-active to ensure Sky becomes approachable … and talk-able.

3 core products, 3 personalised strategies

Our content spanned three core products – Q, Box Sets & Kids – and had a total overhaul in look & feel and delivery.

Sky Q – The Next Generation Box

Launched in 2016, Sky Q was more or less well-received by the public. By listening to all mentions between January & June 2016, we understood the sentiment was 60% positive and 40% negative. Negative mentions derived from price, some product confusion and installation issues.

When talking about Sky Q, we knew we needed to not only create awareness but educate our audience on its features and benefits. As a TV viewer, our audience turns in to escape, indulge, unwind, experience, connect, get together. This is where our proactive and understanding tone of voice entered. Our goal was to avoid any frustrations by being there before they even needed us and show how they couldn’t miss out on Sky Q improved entertainment.

Kids – Just For Kids!

Through our audience analysis, we discovered that parents of young children were not only on social but were likely to visit blogs and forums. Parents enjoy talking about their kids, sharing milestones and looking for tips from other parents. They were open to tools that provided more value to their children in spite of their concern of TV consumption.

With this audience, we needed to create relatable content to them and then give them a reason to download – creating a culture of advocacy as we go. So we launched Ready to Play! to turn Sky into the trusted partner that’s always there to make sure parents (and kids!) never miss out on fun and bonding favourites.

Box Sets – Addictively Good

We approached the third core product the same way we did for the previous ones. Using social listening, we understood where our audience was and how we could use their viewing habits to inform our social strategy to spark the need for Sky Box Sets.

In a world where the viewer is in charge of what they watch, Sky allows Box Setters to indulge in watching Addictively Good shows on their own terms. Sky is the entertainment partner that understands its audience needs, embraces their watching habits and inspires their passion by making sure they never miss the best content.

When SHARE Creative came on board – posting full time from October 2016 – we wanted to make sure no one missed out on the best Sky content and products. We recommended a content strategy focussing on entertainment to increase reach & engagement. Our strategy helped us build a positive share of voice to increase market share and lead to business actions.

Headline results included: 450%+ sentiment increase, 152%+ more engagement, 110%+ more likes, 207%+ more comments, and 60%+ sales uplift (Sky Kids).

These improvements in engagement, reach and views resulted in a vast increase in positive mentions which correlates with an improved share of voice vs competitors. Knowing your audience, proactively engaging and entertaining them with relevant content that they need, when they need it, is what paid off, making Sky audiences love and value the brand even more.

  • Insights Director: Carla Raven
  • Creative Director: Alex Hill
  • Content Director: Adam Gordon
  • Content Manager: Joe Moring
  • Head of Creative: Robyn Saunders
  • Copywriter: Harry Wright
  • Motion Designer: Josh Harvey
  • Motion Designer: Tom Stephens