Unforgotten is currently preparing for Season 4, it has been one of our more successful campaigns. It has its own handle across Facebook and Twitter. We started the campaign in April 2018 after series 2 finished airing in the UK. We started the handles from scratch so initially our brief was to build awareness of the new pages ahead of series 3. We worked closely with production company, Mammoth Screen, to achieve this.
As series 2 of Unforgotten had already aired in the UK when we started our campaign, we focused on promoting the show for Masterpiece PBS in the U.S. We use TX cards to highlight key moments throughout the episodes. We put these out during the show live, this encourages fans to use the hashtag and help us get it trending on Twitter. This is our aim each episode and we hit our goal the majority of the time. For Unforgotten we use the hashtag, #Unforgotten, or if it’s airing in the U.S we’ll use #UnforgottenPBS. This allows us to reuse content for both national and international audiences, using geo-targeting and scheduling software to do this efficiently.
To build engagement on our handles, which were still relatively new at the time, we created the hashtag, #WhoKilledHayley. This focuses on the victim of the series and encourages users to share their theories. We needed engagement to help boost the profile of the page and raise awareness for the show. Week by week we created an official suspect board, using user’s tweets to form their own connections and plot lines. As the series continued the board got busier and busier, until the final episode when we revealed that the case was now closed. We did it in this way, without revealing the final storyline, to prevent any major spoilers for our followers in the U.S.A.
Before starting our campaign we had a look at what people had been saying on Social Media about previous series’. One of the things we noticed was that fans were very intrigued about what was inside the main character, Sunny’s, mysterious backpack. To latch onto this trend we decided to do a ‘What’s in Sunny’s backpack?’ campaign, so prior to each episode we had a flat-lay photo featuring props that are relevant to the theme of the episode.
For example, in the first image on the right which was for episode one, we used the newspaper announcing the body found, police tape, a traffic triangle (because the body was found on the M1) and party poppers as the plot of the story surrounded New Year’s Eve.
Ahead of the show airing we did a short countdown in the style of evidence files. These featured three of the main characters, and they were posted one-a-day for three days ahead of TX. We made these humorous by highlighting the key characteristics that we know fans love about the characters. As well of adding a few subtle hints to the coming series. For example, using the ‘Do Not Lose’ stamp on Cassie’s file, as during series three she loses one of the essential police files. This is something that fans possibly won’t initially notice but will appreciate looking back.
Q&As with the cast and crew are one of our favourite ways to get engagement up prior to an episode. We encourage fans to send their questions in using the hashtag, then we answer them in the run up to the episode airing. This helps our hashtag trend and provides fans with a fun and informative insight into their favourite characters. We tend to do these live and exclusively on Twitter, using our other social platforms to drive traffic in that direction.
For Unforgotten we’ve done Q&As with:
