Netflix and Brill-iant social media
Netflix, the streaming service everyone knows, part of the everyday vernacular and instantly recognisable. It provides endless entertainment through both its original productions and old content, all at the touch of a button. From its origin in 1998 as the world’s first online DVD rental store the company evolved as the flagship online video streaming services, leading the charge for others like Amazon Prime Video, Hulu, and even more traditional TV providers’ forays into the competitive world of online entertainment. The site shows no sign of slowing down with Netflix reporting nearly 170 million paying subscribers in the last quarter of 2019. The question may then be asked, how does Netflix’s social media strategy play into their ongoing success?
Community Engagement
The company has a presence across all the main social medias with a number of accounts under its banner. This includes a nearly 20 Twitter handles, comprised of regional accounts (e.g. NetlfixUK or NetflixIndia) and individual handles for some of their flagship shows, like You and Sex Education.
Netflix engages their established members by embracing the fandoms that exist around their shows. For the Sex Educations’s official Twitter account the display name has been changed to ‘no context sex education’. The account posts subtitled screenshots from the show with no context, in a style adopted by many fan pages of other popular shows. Netflix is running its own fan community, with which it shares exclusive web-based content to its followers. This continued engagement creates a relationship with its members, one of the internet era, a seemingly personal connection between that of a corporate entity and its human users.
Master of Virality
The main Netflix Twitter account on December 5th of 2019 had a hugely successful tweet, amassing over 400,000 times and gaining in excess of 25,000 replies. It was a simple but humorous prompt aimed that begged for responses:
Replies came from company accounts of all different kinds, some examples being: Pringles, Ben & Jerry’s, GiveBlood, DuoLingo, Animal Planet, Instagram, Paramount, Firefox. Their replies were both parts equally crude and original, each specific to their individual brand. Even streaming competitors Hulu got in on the joke. The tweet went viral as internet users spread the inappropriate responses coming from these respected companies, and each time a response was shared Netflix’s original tweet was too. Netflix piggy-backed off the success of each successive reply, spreading their name across the internet. The banter-ish behaviour of Netflix, and the replying accounts, signals a new kind of internet presence that companies are employing that aims for a humanising, ‘cool’, relatable approach — of which Netflix excels.
Netflix has become a verb in itself, ‘Netflix and Chill?’, is in the vocabulary of the masses. Netflix’s use of social media to retain current members and its potential attraction of new ones, keeps the company relevant and at the forefront of popular culture.
