We recently held a webinar to discuss the question: Does size matter when it comes to video production? We were delighted to host Grabyo partners Saran Media and Urban Roosters, who provided valuable insight into how cloud video production is levelling the playing field for media organizations of all sizes in growing social audiences.

Our first guest, Selin Algun, has been the digital marketing and social media manager for Saran Media for the last five years. Saran has been a major distributor in the sports media rights space in Turkey for the past 25 years, hosting some of the world’s most popular sporting properties such as the Champions League, Premier League, NBA and Formula One.

Our second guest, Pedro Henrique, is the Co-CEO and Co-Founder of Urban Roosters, the biggest rap battle promoters in the world for the past eight years, that now operates in six countries across the world. Urban Roosters is paving the way for freestyle rap artists to create sustainable careers from their talent. 

Each of our guests works with various sized production teams to produce video content for their channels – and in this blog we will highlight some of the differences and similarities in their approaches.

Growing social audiences

Gareth Capon, Grabyo CEO, kicked off the webinar by asking both Selin and Pedro about their organizations’ journey and strategy on social media, and how they have cultivated such strong relationships with their audiences.

“It’s the first way for people to know our brand. We’ve never done paid promotions or paid content. We just broadcast and make it go viral on social and on YouTube. That’s how we grew our community and it’s a huge part of what we are doing right now. It’s how we grow organically on social – through fans and through the community. We have influencers – from soccer players to NBA stars, who watch our competitions and become fans. 

What we understood was that each social account is different. The way you use Instagram or interact on TikTok or YouTube is completely different. It’s a different kind of user. So what we try to do is adapt and distribute our content to the best place possible. So we don’t care a lot about bringing people from Instagram to YouTube to watch a long format video. What we try to do is serve them in the best way possible on Instagram, through stories and reels, or on TikTok as well, trying to live broadcast in vertical format. 

With YouTube, Grabyo helped us a lot, not just on the live side but also how we distribute our battles and our short videos as soon as possible. Right now we are pushing VOD from the events still happening, which for us and for our audience, is amazing because if you missed the moment or you want to see the first battle but right now on the live event we are on the third battle, you can go to our YouTube channel and watch it.”

Take a look at one of the great Urban Roosters social clips –

Fael entregando tudo no easy mode pra cima do Lemes. 🔥 #FMSBRASIL

Acessem o link abaixo e apreciem essa linda batalha. https://t.co/roEg7Ek6wI pic.twitter.com/CWy9sJ04aV

— UrbanRoostersBR (@UrbanRoostersBR) June 25, 2022

No matter the size of the organization, the rules for success on social media stay the same. Engagement with content peaks around live events and capitalizing on the biggest moments, especially in sport, will win you views across every social media platform.

Selin Algun explains how Grabyo has been helping Saran Media to stay ahead of its competition by reducing its time to post using our cloud-based technology: 

“If you serve a goal in 7 minutes, then every news platform on Twitter will have already posted the content. For instance, in the Premier League, when Manchester United, Manchester City or Liverpool are playing, news accounts on Twitter are going to cover the game because it’s very important, but they won’t cover it with your footage and they won’t cover it with your name if you are late.

With Grabyo we can deliver the content in around two or three minutes to show everybody the goal. Our Twitter account is like another person who is watching the game. We are sharing important moments and the audience is commenting around them and it is like we are watching together. That’s the most important part for us.”

The power of live

Live social content is one of the most powerful tools for engagement. Fans are able to interact with each other in real-time and engage with your brand. The social features of these platforms now serve to enhance the viewing experience of video. Urban Roosters is an organization that thrives by producing live video content for its global audience. Pedro explains how Urban Roosters is able to produce live content at scale: 

“Across all of our competitions, we have 73 events in six countries. Going from 3 to 5,000 people in the arena. Before and after COVID, we maintained our physical audience and then broadcast digitally. We first started just broadcasting to YouTube, and right now, we are broadcasting to YouTube, Twitch, Tik-Tok and other platforms, plus we are creating our own OTT platform.

We have audiences going from 300 up to 875,000 people watching concurrently and on a regular season, we are seeing 5 million people as our accumulated audience –  and it all started with the digital distribution of our content.”

Branching out with content

Delivering content to multiple social media platforms is key for any organization in growing social audiences. It is key to understand that each platform has its own individual needs, with audiences engaging differently with content on each platform.

For example, longer-form content is expected on YouTube, where watch times are higher. While on TikTok, faster, more punchy and playful content will deliver better results. Selin explains how Grabyo has assisted Saran Media in delivering content to all social media platforms:

“With Grabyo we are present on each and every platform. You can say the content is the same, but we believe it is important to be present. If you don’t like YouTube, you can watch the goals on Twitter or Facebook. We are taking the global rights for Premier League, NBA and F1 [which is] expensive content, so [we generate ROI from] not only linear channels, but social media should also gain money. 

We started with YouTube, which was our main revenue source at the beginning, because you put highlights there with automated ads, plus you can sell sponsorships. But on the other [platforms], you don’t have enough time or enough content to share and to create packages for your clients, because that’s all you can do.

But if you have Grabyo, you can post each and every piece of content at the very same time to all platforms, then you have another project around Twitter, another project around Facebook, and another one around Instagram. So you triple your revenue that way because you don’t [have to] select one and focus on just one specific platform anymore.”

The rise of TikTok

TikTok has grown to unprecedented levels over the past two years. Our recent Social Video Trends report found that TikTok usage had grown 366% YoY in 2021. The platform has become a key tool in growing social audiences.

“We were the pioneers again in this area because TikTok is quite popular in Turkey, and last year we published the first sports hub of Turkey on TikTok. We were partnering with the TikTok Turkey team and it was a great experience.

We had live programs on TikTok around the hub and different VOD content around it. And it was a success story for them and for us as well. We’re going to do the second TikTok hub this year, focusing on sports content and life is working very well on TikTok for Turkey.”

“Livestreaming on TikTok is still pretty new. We are trying to understand the best way to adapt our content because it’s a 9×16 format and we are used to broadcasting to YouTube. So TikTok is a whole new way we should use our cameras, and how we should cut the content. 

So we are trying to understand the best way possible to serve our audience. What we saw that works a lot on YouTube is [audiences] interact with challenges. [We] create some kind of content that the audience can create content upon, so [we] force the audience to interact and create this UGC content, which is the way we’ve been scaling and growing on TikTok. So we are highlighting clips of content or clips from raps, and we ask our audience to replicate, to simulate the clips, to interact, to react to both. We have a mathematic voting system, so we also use the TikTok filters and other engagement stickers they have so they can vote and interact with the content.”

The reality is that in video production, size doesn’t matter when you use the right tools that help you to scale and optimize your video production across channels. Growing social audiences is about reaching consumers with video content in the right place and time. We are here to help – get in touch with us if you’d like to discuss how we can help to you enhance your video production capabilities.