ABC Family has approximately 1.9 million reasons to celebrate last week’s summer finale of the hit series Pretty Little Liars (PLL).
That monumental total, set in the landscape of Twitter, refers to the 637,000 unique contributors who shared more than 1,890,000 tweets on the night of the finale, spiking at 70,000 tweets per minute in the show’s final minute. This social media win also makes the “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t” season finale the “most-tweeted” series episode in TV history.
Dalia Ganz, senior manager, Digital & Partnership Marketing, ABC Family, was equally thrilled to reach this significant PLL milestone. “We were really proud of how the episode performed from a ratings and social perspective,” she explains. “’Ezra is A’ continued to trend on Twitter for more than 24 hours as fans continued to share their reactions.”
The social media campaign for the finale kicked off three weeks before the episode aired, and the #WorldWarA campaign was integrated on-air, on ABCFamily.com, in press outreach and across ABC Family’s social media pages. According to Dalia, “We told fans #WorldWarA was coming and they had to prepare for the big reveal! Fans were so excited for #WorldWarA that the hashtag began trending early in the morning on the day of the finale and continued to trend until midnight, with more than 225,000 tweets using this hashtag on the day of the finale.”
And comparing to last year’s summer season finale, Dalia and team captured the excitement of the show’s biggest fans in a whole new way. “Last summer, after Toby was revealed as a member of the A-team, our fans tweeted photos of themselves reacting to the shocking plot twist. This year, to capitalize on this organic fan behavior, we created the #PLLReaction campaign.” This campaign centered on an app that pulled in reaction photos to form an impressive Pretty Little Liars digital mosaic (click here to see the full image). During the broadcast, on-air snipes ran, telling fans to tweet their reactions to the episode using #PLLReaction. Overall, the campaign was a smashing success—nearly 64,000 fan tweets used #PLLReaction on finale night. The hashtag trended on and off throughout the night on Twitter.
“We knew going into the episode that fans were going to be shocked by all the reveals in the amazing summer finale,” Dalia says. “We created a countdown of the biggest reveals in PLLhistory, promising fans that the reveals in the finale would be bigger than anything they had seen before.”
Check out the infographic below to get the full picture of how the PLL summer finale trended on Twitter.
