Social Media: Purposes and Uses

Social Media: Purposes and Uses

What the difference between how social media is used by individuals, and how its used by media industries and creative professionals?

Individuals tend to use social media for self promotion. They post pictures of themselves and their experiences, and gain a following and attention from it. However industries and creative professionals use social media in order to promote their products and services instead of themselves. A crossover has been created between the two, with individuals becoming ‘influencers’ and almost becoming a brand themselves due to the high levels of attention and interactions they get, and so industries end up promoting their products through them.

Case Study - Avengers Endgame (Anthony and Joe Russo, 2019)

Part of a wider Marvel franchise, bringing together a number of characters from previous films, such as Iron Man and Captain America 

Box Office

It has grossed over $2.7 billion worldwide, surpassing Infinity War’s entire theatrical run in just eleven days and setting numerous highest-grossing film and box office records, and is the highest-grossing film of 2019, as well as the second-highest of all time.

It is the highest-grossing superhero film of all time, highest-grossing film based on a comic book, highest-grossing film released by Walt Disney Studios, second-highest-grossing film of al time worldwide and in the United States and Canada, as well as the fifth-highest-grossing film fo all time worldwide when adjusted for inflation.

Why was it so successful?

Once you are an established franchise, you’re able to advertise across social media platforms a lot more successfully 

There were 20 films before hand, so you have fans from the individual films (Captain America, Iron man etc) coming together to see the final climax with everyone in it

Marvel’s Avengers endgame marketing

Marketing Budget - $200 million

Collective social following - 50 million< on instagram

Youtube trailer views - 109 million views April 2019

Marketing channels - Social media

Partner Brands - #Coke #Google #McDonalds

Return generated - $1.2 billion

A multi channel approach

With 32.5 million followers on instagram, marvel has a well established platform to publish content on.

They have catered their marketing materials specifically to individual channels, for example, using condensed snippets of their trailers on Instagram with a link to the full trailer on YouTube 

Marvel has also stayed consistent with the #AvengersEndgame hashtag being used on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook

Many iterations of poster designs for the movie can be seen on Marvel’s Instagram, Twitter and Facebook too. The stylish poster designs work perfectly on social media to engage fans and visually showcase the actors/characters in the films

To Capitalise on the audience’s bereavement, marvel has produced a series of images for social media juxtaposing the characters who survived with the ones who were snapped out of existance.

A very simple idea but one that builds up the anticipation as to whether the dusted characters will return or not and drives huge engagement.