How We Produced The Most Shared Article In The Coverage Of Netflix’s Singapore Launch
If you have not already heard, the biggest story last week was the launch of Netflix in Singapore. Publications that covered the launch in Singapore included Straits Times, Channel News Asia, Tech In Asia, Nylon, e27, Goody Feed, Vulcan Post, Hardware Zone, Today Online, Mothership, The New Paper and others that we might not be tracking on Parrot.
Here’s a look at all the articles:
Here are the summary of the article performance:
- Tech In Asia was the first to publish the news at 2.30am, followed by both Straits Times and Channel News Asia at around 3.30am.
- The most shared article is by Vulcan Post with over 6.5k+ Facebook counts, followed by Straits Times with 3.4k+ Facebook counts. Tech In Asia’s article has 2.4k+ Facebook counts. Nylon’s and Hardware Zone’s coverage followed after. (Accurate as of 10th January 2016)
- Here’s a look at the Facebook fans of the various publication — Straits Times (695,000), Channel News Asia (989,000), Tech in Asia (303,000), Vulcan Post (12,000).
- The reach of Vulcan Post’s Netflix’s launch coverage is almost double the reach of Straits Times’ coverage (based on Facebook’s share count).
What Vulcan Post did differently.
Despite not being the one of the first few to cover the news, as well as having a relatively small social reach (11k+ Facebook fans) as compared to Straits Times, Channel News Asia, Tech In Asia and the others, Vulcan Post’s article managed to be the most widely shared Netflix article. Here’s a deeper look at the article:
Here are some reasons why we think the article piece stood out:
1) Time Of Publishing
While Vulcan Post’s article wasn’t the first to be published, the article was still published relatively early at 9.30am when all the crowd starts to check their phone on the train.
At this point, most would have read about the news covered by Straits Times or Channel News Asia which had an early start with their articles published at 3.30am. So it is only necessary to include all the basic information, allowing readers to quickly process them and share them.
2) Featured Image and description
To stand out, the featured image used on the article has to be eye catchy and sharable. Here’s a comparison between Straits Times, Channel News Asia, Tech in Asia, Hardware Zone and Vulcan Post’s featured image:
We created a custom image for most of our Facebook Post. For the case of the Netflix article, the key information chosen to be presented through the featured image was the pricing, which most readers / Singaporeans are most interested about. The word “Netflix” was also prominently highlighted (takes up 50% of the featured image) so it stands out on the news feed when you scroll through the app. The pricing was also included in the Facebook post description and caption.
Bite size content
While Straits Times and The New Paper provides a more in depth coverage of Netflix with more information included from the official press release, Vulcan Post’s article included bite size content with focus on the pricing — the one key information that would generate the most hype. This way readers don’t spend too much time reading the article and once they are done with the 1–2 minutes read, they can straight away share the article.
Facebook Boosting — One Final Push?
We (Vulcan Post) also spent S$3 in boosting the article to Singapore based audience who liked Netflix’s page when the post started to pick up.
While the boosting resulted in 2,460 paid reach, it is only a small fraction of the total organic reach of the article. The boost also only resulted in 3 shares — which isn’t that high. Our cost per action = S$0.03 /cost per click = S$0.038.
Takeaway: A combination of timeliness & bite size content & eye catchy title / image / description = Win.
This article is based on data from Parrot, a powerful content research tool which indexes all the publications in Singapore via virality.
Ps: If you enjoy this, please share this? We wanted to set up a paywall for this but decided to share the knowledge instead.
Pps: You should really really check out Parrot today! We also do weekly updates on the most shared articles in Singapore.
