SM Entertainment — Korean Entertainment Company as one of the best global social media influencers
When asked about brands with huge social media presence, most of us would think of the mainstream companies such as Coca Cola, Oreos, Apple and others that we hear almost on a daily basis. However, what we usually overlook are companies or brands that strive on pure brand loyalty from their followers towards their services such as record labels and entertainment companies. You are probably thinking, ‘Wait, when we follow artists, we don’t really care much about their behind-the-scenes and what’s going on with their companies. We just listen to their songs or follow their work’. That is true, but I’m not talking about the mainstream western entertainment companies, but specifically the ones in the Korean music industry that will change the way you view the daily responsibilities of entertainment companies.
I personally think that the Kpop industry contains a whole world in itself. It’s an underrated dimension because it is not as widely known or accepted as western pop music. I am saying this not only because I am a Kpop fanatic, but also because I genuinely think they have one of the best marketing strategies and social media presence that could easily put them on par with western pop music. To some people, Kpop is obscure and exists in their oblivion because the closest thing we know of Kpop is probably the Gangnam Style phenomenon that happened five years ago. Hence, that is all the more reason to dive deeper into how Korean entertainment companies, specifically SM Entertainment, effectively manage their social media content and maintain their followers’ engagement.
Here is a brief history and explanation of what SM Entertainment is as a company:
It was founded in 1995 by the Head Producer Lee Soo Man and was the first entertainment company to provide systematic casting, training, producing, and management system as well as discovering and responding to new music trends.
Their corporate philosophy is as follows:
“As a company that produces the best in cultural content and entertainers by using state-of-the-art culture technologies, SM Entertainment aims to touch the people’s hearts and promote Korean culture in every corner of the world with the goal of contributing to national economic growth and a more affluent life for everyone.”
One of their goals clearly explains why they have tight social media routine:
“Becoming the best digital content provider to lead the Internet and mobile markets. A true global company.”
That is one big goal they have and I wouldn’t argue to the fact that they are already halfway there because currently they have considerable market share for the Asian entertainment industry. (893.65 Billion Korean Won/839.18 million USD Market Cap).
Ever since new social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter emerged, SM Entertainment have been using these platforms to its fullest. They would be considered social medial influencers because they form a certain level of connectivity, have a direct access to their followers, as well as building their own community so called ‘SMTOWN’ or ‘SM Family’ to keep people engaged and provide a sense of unity of being part of a larger group. It is almost as if they have their online and visual marketing down to a science. They are always actively updating their content consistently and daily across all their social media platforms such as Twitter (6.59M followers), Facebook (5.5M followers), Instagram (2.1M followers), Youtube (14M subscribers), and also maintaining the same aesthetics and patterns with every posts in order to give off a sense of coherence even if they are promoting different events. Depending on the events they are posting, they would also start a hashtag and encourage people to use it, which I think is a very effective and efficient way to promote without actually having to ‘promote’. The fans will do the job just fine.
Their visuals are always kept simple, clean, and minimalistic giving their company a sense of prestige. Any passerby who just happens to come across their social media sites would still be impressed by their chosen aesthetics. Not only do they aim to provide good quality content through the music and performances their artists put out, but also in every online aspects, which is what people root for. Aside from having their social media team constantly posting their content, they also encourage their own artists to post more ‘personal’ pictures and selfies on their own social media accounts in order to promote the feeling of intimacy with their followers.
Furthermore, SM realizes that a huge part of their target market is located in China, so they made sure to use other social media sites such as Weibo (China’s equivalent of Twitter) to accommodate for China’s ban on Twitter, Facebook etc. This way they would still be able to maintain direct contact with their followers in China the same way as the ones in other countries.
To describe the extent of their reach, SM doesn’t only have their own websites and accounts for their different artists and groups, but they also have several of their own apps that enhances their brand image in different ways as well as keeping their followers always within their SM loop. Each of these apps can be deemed as a self-contained community.
For example, they have their own game called SuperStar SMTOWN that literally works the same way as the good old Taptap Revenge game that used to be so popular back when who knows when, but only contain songs from their artists.
Another example is Everysing smart karaoke in which people can sing along to their favorite songs both in English or Korean and record themselves and share it on the app in which others can view and rate it. This app builds a community in itself that SM oversees daily via AWS, which I will talk about later.
Not only that, they also have an app called Fanbook, encouraging and supporting fanart of their artists. They sometimes hold events for people to win prizes by submitting their artwork through this app, which may or may not be selected by the artists themselves.
To put it another way, it seems as though SM is trying to build their own empire in which they can easily monitor and preserve their existing relationship with their followers by figuring out the things they want and things they don’t. To put it in a negative way, it isn’t that much different from putting their followers in a filter bubble and feeding them with non-stop quality content that is hard to resist, an environment that they have full control over what content people get to see. It appears to be a given that such companies would use the power of technology and social media nowadays, but to coordinate content the way SM did across so many platforms at once so that no matter where you are or which site you are viewing from, you will always receive the same message.
Those were the ways SM chooses to maintain existing relationships. What about their attempt to gain more exposure for their brand outside of their market? What I found interesting was their extensive collaborations and endorsements between their artists and other companies, which not only does it help SM reach a different market but also instigate a diffusion of their followers with the collaborators’ brand, a win-win for both sides. Whenever they are planning on a collaboration with another company, they would make sure to hype it up either on Twitter or Instagram weeks before the commercial/ad is released by posting very short clips or teaser images.
Here are some examples of their recent collaborations:
What are the things they are not doing? Well, unlike companies like Oreos that makes sure to post content that radiates fun and light-humor, SM tends to be more sophisticated with what they choose to post. If you go on their Twitter, you will see how structured it is, leaving very little room for humor and memes. Since SM is an entertainment company, they might want to be taken more seriously to convey a trustworthy and prestige image to their followers. However, some might argue that this makes them less ‘approachable’ as a company, drawing a distinct line between them and the general public.
Another thing that they don’t do is responding to tweets or even hate comments. They don’t respond on either their social media platforms which again brings back the idea of drawing a line between them and their followers. I think if they start responding to these tweets, they would give off a more friendly and approachable vibe, but then again what they provide doesn’t have direct impact on a person nor does a particular person have that much of an impact on them, unlike companies that would have to frantically resolve a problem a customer posted online about their food as an example.
Even if they don’t respond to individual complaints, that doesn’t mean that they don’t listen to what their followers have to say. Beside from having great influence on the followers, listening is also an important factor, in which allows SM to be named as a social influencer. One time, various of their followers were tweeting about how SM should start suing to protect their artists from the ones who posted hate comments. After thousands of pleading from their followers, SM responded with an announcement that they will start taking legal actions towards any defamation of their artists and asked participation of their fans to send in any evidence in writing for their newly formed legal team. With that announcement, countless malicious comments and articles have been deleted in a matter of hours. I think the impact has some correlation with SM being the company that rarely responds to online hate because once they do, they mean business.
Back to how they organize and monitor their activities. I mentioned the app Everysing earlier, which after watching an interview with SM’s CISO Sangsik Joo, it was revealed that they use Amazon’s cloud computing as a way to reduce the traffic as well as overseeing their daily activities. This goes to show that they are actively using these analytics to help them gain the online success they are having now. There are probably more ways to their success that they are not telling us but with just this much, it is already easy to tell that they are the king of social media influence.
You can say that this is normal or expected, but from someone who follows their content on a daily basis, they come up with more amazing stuff as the years go. I think we can definitely learn and implement similar strategies that SM Entertainment is using for companies in different industries as well as for those who are looking to develop their personal brand. I can probably write a book about this but to fully understand and grasp what I tried to explain, you might have to follow them and experience it yourself.
