27 Oct The Future of Social at Flix
Greg Johnson, Director of Marketing
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Facebook is dying. Well, that’s not necessarily true but if you spend any time listening to marketers attempting to predict the “next big thing” you will certainly hear some variation on this mantra. Of course, we’ve heard this tune sung before back when social media was just an infant and MySpace was on the chopping block (obviously it was in fact true for them). Since then, as we all know, Facebook has become an unstoppable juggernaut that has permeated nearly every facet of life online. Perhaps only Google is more prevalent than Facebook. To think that Facebook is going away anytime soon would be a dramatic overstatement.
As we look, however, at the ever-evolving landscape of social media when measured against the growing Flix Brewhouse brand, it is apparent that the time has come to start shifting our strategic social media focus away from a singular Facebook hub strategy and to expand into various emerging markets in 2018 and beyond. While there are many social networks now that have reached a large enough audience to be worthy contenders, there are two platforms that are of particular interest to Flix.
The first is Instagram. While Flix already has an account here (@FlixBrewhouse), we have yet to deploy a full blown strategic initiative for using this channel. Instagram, which has been owned by Facebook since 2012, is a social network designed around sharing photos and videos with groups of friends in a feed much like Facebook. Unlike Facebook, however, there are no text updates without an accompanying visual component.
Instagram now boasts over 700 million users. That’s big. What is of particular interest to the Flix brand is that the fastest growing audience on Instagram is women ages 21-35 (a key target demographic for Flix). As we begin to deploy more visual content, as well as interactive contests and promotions, we expect to grow our following from our ~2,500 followers to well over 10,000 in 2018.
The second network that we will begin experimenting with in 2018 is Snapchat. Snapchat is quite different from Facebook or Instagram in that users don’t follow each other and read feeds. Instead, they send peer-to-peer direct messages that are driven by visuals (photo or video). Within the app, users can add overlays to their content, often based on geo-specific parameters to their current location. Snapchat currently has over 170 million active daily users, an impressive feat for such a young network, and importantly, Snapchat is demographically young in many respects. The company launched only five years ago and has one of the youngest user bases of all the social networks. It is this very user base that makes Snapchat a particularly interesting segment for Flix. These are the guests that influence their families to join us for a movie and will be the drivers of future financial success if we can win their loyalty at an early age. In 2016, 60% of Snapchat users were under the age of 24 and over two thirds of those users were under 18. Snapchat currently boasts that people under the age of 25 spend more time using Snapchat than Instagram (currently sitting at a whopping 40 minutes a day!).
While Facebook continues to be a force that cannot be ignored, these emerging networks represent a great opportunity for Flix Brewhouse to continue to connect with its guests. As we expand our reach into these new networks, we can and will build more loyalty and brand evangelists at an earlier age to advance our Flix Brewhouse brand as we rapidly grow.
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