Travel Channel’s goals were to leverage social media for increased viewership of network programs, as well as web traffic to support advertising. By actively building its community presence in social media, the network sought to create deeper engagement with its content to drive tune in.

Challenge

• Creating a unified brand approach across multiple social platforms and shows
• Balancing content exclusive to social media and TravelChannel.com
• Integrating talent into the conversation stream
• Avoiding excess promotion in the effort to drive tune in
• Defining metrics to gauge success

Approach

• Influencer identification and outreach focused around the brand, show/host topics and regional interests
• Creation of brand hubs and “show spokes” in Facebook, YouTube, MySpace and Twitter
• Game-based Twitter marketing, widget and custom Facebook applications to extend fan engagement
• Deployment of community managers to monitor, respond and build a community following
• Marketing dashboard development to support reporting, analysis and correlation of social activity to show ratings

Results

• Facebook and Twitter - top referring sites to TravelChannel.com
• Proven statistical correlation between Facebook interactions and TravelChannel.com traffic
• Over 1.5 million community members with consistent 30%+ quarter over quarter growth
• Over 175 million impressions per quarter through social media communities
• 10% of show-related conversation online now happens while watching an episode
• PRSA Gold Award for social media