Social videos introduce TikTokers and Insta fans to PBS film library

A social video series on TikTok and Instagram aims to create authentic and timely engagement around PBS documentaries. 

PBS Film Club launched last November with a series of short videos discussing and recommending films. Co-creators Marissa Pina, senior manager of social engagement, and Lucky Nguyen, a social video producer/editor, are building a community of fans and attempting to create more visibility for PBS within viral social media conversations. 

In January they had a breakthrough with a social media push around TikTok, Boom., the 2022 Independent Lens film featuring Gen Z influencers “dissecting” how the platform works. After the U.S. Supreme Court indicated that it would uphold the law banning TikTok unless it is sold to new owners, Pina and Nguyen recut footage from an earlier social video about the film and posted it on TikTok and Instagram.

“We saw the conversation about TikTok and its future happening across social media,” says Pina, recalling the reaction to whether U.S. TikTokers would lose access to the popular platform. In response, they adapted their earlier video to “make it feel like we were giving an answer to the question that was being asked.”

In the 46-second video, Nguyen describes efforts by Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg to get TikTok banned in the U.S. then invites social media users to watch the whole documentary. The video garnered over 924,500 views, 128,600 likes and nearly 3,600 comments on TikTok since its release. 

Matt Schoch, PBS’ senior director for content strategy, took the social media response as proof the PBS Film Club team can put PBS firmly in the middle of conversations as they’re playing out on social platforms. “It’s a balance of planning out what we think people will talk about and being reactive and serving the conversation,” Schoch says. 

Pina and Nguyen created PBS Film Club to “highlight the vastness of [PBS’] library in a way that really engages people and creates a community” online, says Pina. The short videos, which now run about 90 seconds long, emphasize the cultural relevance of PBS documentaries old and new. 

In each installment, either Pina, Nguyen or the two of them together, react to what they learned from watching the selected film, all with the aim of making TikTokers or Instagram users curious enough to watch themselves. 

“Me and Lucky wanted to create a series that was really fun and super easy,” says Pina. “We wanted it to feel like you are chatting with your friends and getting recommendations for things that you should watch.” 

Niche community on Fable 

The cross-platform strategy includes a partnership with Fable, a mobile app designed for book lovers and film/TV watchers to discover and chat about stories they love (or not). Pina says Fable has 2.1 million registered users as of Feb. 17. 

An avid reader who began using Fable last year, Pina was impressed by its functionality and social networking experience, especially when compared to other reading platforms she’d used. “I knew there was an audience there that wanted to talk about what they watched as well as read,” she says. “I thought it was a great chance to create a smaller, niche community space where people could gather.” 

Pina also spotted an opportunity to tap into an audience that’s much younger than PBS’ loyal TV viewers. Fable’s audience is predominantly women ages 18 to 35, much younger than devotees of Masterpiece. With succinct and punchy social videos, Pina believed PBS Film Club had a good shot at attracting Fable users, she recalls. 

“I’m always looking for ways to reengage people between 20 and 40 by reminding them what PBS does,” she says. “I want to show them, ‘This is what you loved as a kid. This is what you’ll love as an adult.’”

Fable provides a space for PBS Film Club members to communicate directly about selected films. Users can post comments in multiple chat rooms where members of the PBS team moderate the discussion, ask questions and react to participants’ posts. 

Within the first two months of its launch on Fable, 1,000 members had joined PBS Film Club. “The other clubs usually average between 500 and 700 members, so it was really exciting to reach that number,” says Pina. 

Discussions around PBS Film Club videos occur on TikTok and Instagram, where the videos and reactions to the films can reach millions of users. Pina and Fable have also produced a newsletter that encourages Instagram and TikTok users to join the conversations on Fable app. A newsletter that the partners sent in November to promote the Film Club drove signups by 500 members.

Pivot to engagement

PBS’ social team created the Film Club after they saw drops in social media responses. Analytics data from 2021 into 2022 showed declining performance by PBS’ social media promotions, Schoch says. PBS’ reach on Instagram — its impressions, followers, shares and comments — also trended down over this period. 

Beyond PBS’ own metrics, research from Sprout Social, a social media management and analytics platform, has found that social media users are turned off by brands that are too promotional, Schoch says. 

A social audit by the Town Hall agency for PBS also guided how the social and marketing team tweaked its approach. The audit showed that user engagement is more powerful for content that is “more timely, engaging, and designed to build conversation, not to drive clicks,” he adds. 

“Social platforms, unsurprisingly, reward content that keeps people on their platforms longer,” he says. In early 2022, the social team began prioritizing content that genuinely engages users over click-focused promotions. 

When Schoch began managing the social team in late 2019 80% of PBS’ posts were click-focused promotions, he estimates. The remaining 20% were designed to engage users. “Over the years, … we’ve been evolving that mix towards engagement content,” he says. “We now strive towards something closer to 80/20 engagement.” 

“This is not a designated allotment,” he adds. “We don’t plan our social posting calendar to exactly hit that ratio. Rather it is more of a strategic representation of what we should prioritize.”

Shorter is better 

Pina and Nguyen pitched their idea for PBS Film Club to Schoch and Amy Wigler, VP of marketing, last August. 

They “wanted to give the audience something that felt familiar, while exposing them to something they probably hadn’t seen before, all while supporting the library,” Schoch recalls. 

The official greenlight came in October. Fable unveiled the club as its first branded community for book and TV fans Oct. 30. The deal covered ten short videos as part of the initial rollout. 

In creating the series, Pina and Nguyen considered special events, such as Native American Heritage Month and Veterans Day, and cultural conversations that never die down on social media, such as wealth inequality, the internet and addiction. Then they combed the PBS archives to find documentaries addressing these topics. 

After watching the films and writing notes for their scripts, Pina and Nguyen filmed once a week, two weeks in advance of posting each episode on social media. The lead time allowed them to shoot and edit the footage and share their clip for internal review.

Whether they’re presenting together or solo, Pina and Nguyen regularly start each video with a question that sets up a discussion in the comments. They’re candid about their own emotional reactions to each film and make a point of describing how the story relates to what’s happening in the world today. 

“Almost all of the videos are asking a question or asking people to participate in a conversation,” Pina explains. 

Over time, Pina and Nguyen have reduced the length of the videos. Metrics on the first videos — one of which ran as long as 4 minutes, 30 seconds — led them to conclude that shorter is better. Then, their 1:41 video on American Historia: The Untold History Of Latinos amassed over 120,300 views on TikTok after it posted Jan. 10. A week later, another TikTok video on American Historia got 118,400 views. “We realized that cutting it down made it better,” says Pina. “The way the algorithms are working and with current attention spans, this is the most successful way to do it.” 

Based on the response, Schoch and his team greenlit another 10 episodes of PBS Film Club. Three of these have already posted — a video on the Feb. 24 death of singer and pianist Roberta Flack, a description of how abolitionist Harriet Tubman experienced seizures and visions, and the career of country music artist Patsy Cline. 

Taken collectively, PBS Film Club’s social campaign has “over-performed [their] benchmarks both in terms of views and engagement,” Schoch says. The social team tracks video view time where possible, but not every platform offers this metric. Pina personally tracks the number of shares a video gets, she says. She sees shares as the equivalent of people registering their intent in the topic or content. 

Schoch recommends that social teams from other PBS shows follow the Film Club’s partnership with Fable and think about creating social media marketing campaigns that are targeted to specific audiences. There are plenty of “opportunities to find a niche community group,” he says. 

He points to promotional marketing of The Great American Recipe on Pinterest since the cooking show’s 2022 launch. “Home cooks and food fans” congregate on the social media pinboard, where the “PBS Food” digital brand has built a presence since 2011, says Schoch. It now has 51,800 followers. 

On niche-focused social platforms, a devoted community of 1,000 followers are more valuable in building affinity to PBS “than 100,000 who stumble upon something on bigger platforms,” he adds.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misreported details about metrics for the second PBS Film Club social video about TikTok, Boom. It generated 924,500 views on TikTok and 128,600 likes.