Always Be on All Platforms!
Since the early 2000s, I’ve been following an original YouTuber called Philip DeFranco. He focuses on the news and works to cover the news in as non-biased as a way as he can. Over the years, his content, although very similar to what he makes today, has evolved over time in quite an interesting way.
To start, back then, there wasn’t Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Reddit… nothing. Just MySpace was popular. I wasn’t old enough to really be apart of that universe, but I used to visit pages of different celebrities. So I won’t talk about MySpace, but I can talk about his joining of different platforms as each of those aforementioned came into existence and how he utilized each.
Besides from YouTube, which is obviously his main platform (and which will be spoken about later), there are three major platforms he utilizes almost daily to leverage his content on YouTube:
When Facebook came to be, he quickly made a page for his fans to join, follow, etc. As Facebook evolved the page from being a page you can follow that looked a lot like personal pages, it started to become an actual page. Somewhere where fans can see his thoughts posted via statuses. But as time went on, the page activity turned almost corporate like. It now shows a short clip from each of his daily videos and a quick blurb about what was being covered. These don’t just show a quick highlight of a story that he covered that day, but it also serves as a nice reminder to myself and many others that the show has been released for the day. Otherwise, they don’t even give you the link to the video.
Twitter became a very big platform for DeFranco and remains that way today. It has become apparent that to remain relevant on Twitter, it would require constant and nearly daily use. He uses it to catch wind of news stories, see tweets from certain figures, research and to talk to what he calls “The Nation” aka, his fans. That is what happens a lot behind the scenes. Things that we don’t see. But even then, what he does behind the scenes is exactly what we need to add to this analysis of the way he uses Twitter. The way he uses it as a way to talk to his fans about what he should include as topics in today’s show or to announce that he has released another video helps to create a space for his fans where they can depend on the news coming out of him. If I don’t see a show come out today when there was supposed to be a scheduled one, I quickly search up his Twitter account and search through his latest tweets to find some sort of indicator as to why he isn’t on. This constant allows him to fill the void and answer questions on the fly to keep a close connection to his fans. He participates in his own “nation” using these various platforms.
Reddit is another interesting area he has decided to expand his social media use. This is another platform he uses to connect, he allows for open conversations between himself, the moderators and his fans. To tailor his YouTube content to his fans, he asks them every day what they would like to have included into his segments. Reddit (along with Twitter) becomes the treasure trove for information and potential stories. Everything from serious news about a bombing in Syria to how small Donald Trump’s hands looked can be found on his subreddit (https://www.reddit.com/r/DeFranco/). Most of that becomes tailored to finding stories, but the community is encouraged to have a conversation on that platform as it is easier to have a back and forth conversation there. On the rare occasion, he would even use it to host a quick Q&A session to further have a chance to interact with the audience that otherwise he would never see.
Now, besides from these three platforms, he utilizes a few other ones to bring presence to himself, less so his brand like the previous three do. These two platforms are used more for leveraging his personality and allows more dedicated fans to have a glimpse into his life (almost like an extended family) instead of always seeing everything that has to do with his work.
Instagram is not as heavily used for keeping up to date as it is to be present on these platforms. He will often times screenshot his tweets and share them in the post, or he will post a lot of pictures of his family life. This becomes more of a platform for those who want to follow his life rather then a plafrom to follow his work. Obviously not everyone is going to love him even if they love his content, but this is where dedicated fans can go and indulge in how cute his son is or see what he is like when he isn’t sitting in a dark blue room talking about the news.
Snapchat
Snapchat is another one of those platforms used for more personal stuff. Although, I am finding more and more that he does a lot of announcements about his videos going live on it more than before. It often times shows his stories that have him wandering about his office and laughing with his colleagues about something stupid. His handle on that is a little different than the other handles though, which is worth analysing. All his other usernames tend to follow the theme of @ phillyd or @ philipdefranco (please excuse the spaces, they are tagging people I don’t want to tag to this post), but this one is @ thedefrancofam which is actually the handle of his wife’s channel that focuses on his wife and their son (soon to be sons). He managed to lose some coherency here, not sure how come that happened, but it tends to confuse the audience who followed this expecting to see his family and not him. His large scale audience shows the effect it would have when companies do not keep consistency in their branding, it causes confusion and can lose people that way. Otherwise, all this other social media handles are fine. Personally, I don’t think they’d be missing much.
Last but not least, the most important piece of the puzzle, YOUTUBE!
YouTube
His main platform. Where it all began. Starting with some really trashy videos, he has evolved himself to a point where he is planning to create a whole news network based off of it, but that’s still in the works, so that will not be discussed. What will be is his main channel, The Philip DeFranco Show, previously called SXEPhil and the vlog channel, AKA Philly D, AKA the vloggity.
The main channel is where he does news videos, Mondays through Thursdays and the occasional Friday video that goes over the comments on the week’s videos. The main appeal of his main channel’s brand is that he is to be a more reliable news source because he does all his research personally and fact checks what he is about to report on in hopes that he does not spread false news. If for whatever reason, the news turns out to be false, he will apologize for the incorrect information and either retract or correct his statements. Sometimes, depending on the story, he will update the videos as the news come in via the description section or comment on it the next day.
The Vloggity is for those who again, are more dedicated, and want to see more Phil but not talking about the news. It is filmed by one of his colleagues and they create a funny little video depicting those who are in the office that day and sometimes has little community things, like voting on who made the best website.
These two are currently the two channels that he personally runs. He had created two successful channels called SourceFed and SourceFed Nerd which he had sold off to another company which in turn within the past week or so, had just shut down.
All the channels that he has created or the content that he creates is a strong contributor for his brand and he works hard to make sure that his actions match his reputation.
It is important to note here, the reason why he has such presence on all social media platforms. If YouTube or any of these sites were to go down, his whole brand wouldn’t fall like some have. He would be able to salvage his brand off a still living platform and let people know that there is a transition happening to another platform elsewhere.
The strength of his use on various platforms allows the nation to remain strong and remain prevalent even if something goes wrong. When YouTube has uploading troubles, he can go on Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, etc. to tell the nation that he can’t upload. Maybe he’ll use Vimeo or just Snapchat his whole news cast. Maybe he even makes his own website.
The clever use of social media makes it very hard for him to be taken down on purpose or otherwise because he is able to quickly move his content from one platform to another and it does not rely heavily on the success of another company or platform to survive. He can take his content on the road and generally work anywhere to continue producing content. Plus, having chosen to speak about proper news, none of that tabloid nonsense, he is able to have an everlasting source of content to work with.
Overall, he has now created an insanely strong brand due to his variety of social media choices, so those who don’t use certain social medias can still reach him and the variety of content he shares across these different platforms allows fans to become more or less involved with him, leveraging his brand in everything that he does.
BONUS: Here’s April 6th’s video, he told us not to share it *wink wink*…. so here it is! Not like I needed to visit Russia anytime soon anyways.
