How brands are creating content for the behemoth social platform’s newest offering.
Experimenting with a new social media platform can be intimidating. So Denny’s decided to bring in the big guns to helm its latest content marketing strategy: A talking pancake.
But that might be exactly what consumers are craving for their Facebook Live content.
Facebook Live launched in December 2015, and although publishers began experimenting with the platform faster than it took BuzzFeed to explode a watermelon one rubber band at a time (approximately 45 minutes, according to the media giant’s 10 million view-plus livestream), it has taken brands a little longer to create content for the new platform.
And so, last week, Denny’s decided to take its first foray into Facebook Live with a QVC-like show in which a, that’s right, talking pancake interacted with consumers and doled out various prizes.
Denny’s even created a separate website for the “Breakfast Stuff Network” (BSN, for insiders) to complement the Facebook Live endeavor.
The reaction on the Twitterers was somewhat snarky:
I'm not so sure about this talking pancake. Everyone is jumping on FB Live. Even Denny's https://t.co/zL4fEKyPZr
— sarah shipley (@Shipleycom) August 17, 2016
Desperate times call for desperate measures : Denny's animated talking pancake https://t.co/68YuZFGZNx
— Artem Mikhlin (@mikhlin) August 15, 2016
But according to Digiday, there is, in fact, a demographic for talking breakfast foods. “The Grand Slam,” which is the animated web series that inspired the QVC Facebook Live endeavor, garnered over 62 million views since it launched in 2014.
According to MediaPost, Denny’s two Facebook Live broadcasts accumulated 8,877 and 6,727 video views, respectively, and 10,056 and 3,825 engagements, respectively, and the site generated approximately 14,000 uniques.
But was the effort worth it?
Competitor IHOP did a far more low-key pancake-centric Facebook Live video in June in which it streamed videos of real-live pancakes sitting on a plate at the beach. Although the pancakes didn’t talk, because they were pancakes, Digiday reports that the video resulted in 385,000 views with people watching for more than 171,000 minutes.
(And let’s not even talk about how much cheaper IHOP’s pancake content cost.)
Facebook Live is a strange beast, and brands are still experimenting with different ways to shine.
