Won’t You Be Our Viewer?
Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood is a well-known children’s show, aimed at ages 2-5, that airs on PBS Kids. The show is produced by Fred Rogers Productions, the famous host of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ended in 2001. The show takes place in the neighborhood of Make-Believe, which comes from Mister Roger’s Neighborhood and features multiple characters or children of characters from the original beloved show. The most important aspect of the television show is the content, which is modeled after Fred Rogers’ teaching and newer research into child development. The website page for Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood says that the show teaches “strategy songs” about learning social and emotional skills.
The Problem
While Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood has been consistently renewed on PBS Kids and gets consistent five-star ratings from parents on Common Sense Media, which applaud the show’s lessons and models of positive behavior, many competitors greatly overshadow the show. For example: Bluey, Paw Patrol, The Owl House, and Spidey and His Amazing Friends tend to take much of the spotlight on children’s television programs. Most of the competing shows are also owned by Disney and are available via streaming platforms like Disney Plus, whereas the PBS Kids streaming platform operates on a schedule instead of being more on demand. To remain competitive while taking back a share of the market in children’s television, Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood must create a strong social media presence to increase awareness of the show and increase viewership via PBS Kids instead of regular television programming.
Increasing Awareness
Increasing awareness and increasing viewership go hand-in-hand, no one is going to watch a show if they have no idea what it is. Most awareness of television shows comes from social media, so it is important to have a consistent flow of content on social media and utilize an editorial content calendar to organize relevant and thoughtful postings. Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood and PBS Kids have active Instagram accounts with a strong flow of varied content. According to HubSpot, all strong brand usernames should include a recognizable username, be public, post high-quality content, and have a trackable link in the bio. On Instagram, danieltigertv engages in all of those practices and even has interactive posts which can be vital in driving traffic to the show. At the same time, they would benefit more from posting short (30 sec-1 min) clips from the show to serve as highlight reels, which may further motivate the audience to watch a full episode. PBS Kids (pbskids) also follows the HubSpot best practices for brand Instagram accounts but does not actively promote Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood that often, which may be a factor in low viewership. To address this, PBS Kids should post every time a new episode airs and direct the audience to view the episode via PBS Kids streaming to ensure the audience understands and follows through with the call to action.
Something that may be detrimental to the overall awareness of the show and its streaming platform is the lack of presence on TikTok. Neither Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood nor PBS Kids has an official TikTok account. Although the possible ban of TikTok in the United States is looming, it is still one of the most largely used social media platforms across the world and would be essential in increasing viewership. (Read more about the important of TikTok to social media strategies here and here!) Similar to the previously mentioned best practices for brand Instagram accounts, the official show and streaming platform accounts should utilize a recognizable username, and a consistent bio (it is easiest to use the same one from Instagram to achieve a coherent brand image across all platforms), continue to use a trackable link in the bio as well, and link to other social platforms. TikTok has a special feature to link directly to Instagram, which could prove useful. MetriCool also mentions using the pin feature to emphasize popular videos, in this case, it could be the show’s introduction, or creators can even change the pinned video as the content changes.
Editorial Calendar
Using an editorial calendar is necessary when it comes to creating a consistent posting schedule while maintaining a clear and recognizable brand image and reputation across all social media platforms. When working with a full team of marketers and content creators, editorial calendars serve as a tool to help users “collaborate, organize, and track editorial content,” (Brekke, 2024). With a platform like CoSchedule, it is easy to run a collaborative editorial calendar that aids in the organization and scheduling of content. In this case, social media managers can schedule content to drop to preview an episode two days in advance and then schedule a post of clips from the episode two days after it airs. PBS Kids can schedule content to be posted three hours before an episode of a show airs to alert parents that a new episode is coming. Editorial calendars are also extremely important in scheduling things much further in advance, so managers can create a content schedule for an entire season of episodes before the first episode even drops. At the same time, PBS Kids can create a content schedule that relates to when different episodes will be shown on their streaming schedule, which creates a routine that engages new viewers, which turns into returning viewers.
Capitalizing on Nostalgia
Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood is an all-time favorite children’s television show that creates many fond memories for an array of people. A lot of the people that were children while the show was on air are now adults with families of their own, including children between the ages of 2-5. Although the names of the shows are similar, one has to do a little bit of research to truly find out that Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood are connected through Daniel Tiger, who is the father of Daniel Tiger in what is essentially a spin-off. If the connection between the two shows was made common knowledge via social media posts such as TikToks and Instagram reels that show side-by-sides or other overlaps in the show’s content it would be more likely to reach the market of young parents. This market segment also has a high consumption rate of streaming platforms, which makes them perfect to increase the viewership of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood through PBS Kids streaming.
Engaging Content
Engaging content can be a wonderful tool to employ in any social media strategy and one of the best ways to create engaging content is to leverage user-generated content, it is also extremely important to any strong digital marketing strategy, which is truly the future of advertising. (Read more here!) User-generated content can come in many forms but is most successful when reflecting the real audience, which is often more diverse than what others would imagine. In today’s age, inclusivity is all-important to the world of digital media creation, users need and want to see themselves in all kinds of content. This idea is wonderfully reflected in a new article from Pursue & Persuade. Inclusivity also plays a key role to the fundamental guiding principles in the Fred Rogers’ curriculum that Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood uses to base their show upon. Using engaging and interactive content on the Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood social media pages would aid greatly in interacting with current viewers while attracting new ones.
For example, the Instagram and TikTok pages for Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood could run a short but interactive campaign centered around creating a community of children who watch the show, essentially forming their own “neighborhood.” The social media pages would post a promotion asking for parents to post short videos of their children on Instagram and TikTok saying “Hi, Neighbor!” The videos must be posted with the hashtag #wereallneighbors. All videos will be edited together to showcase the diverse community that tunes in and learns from Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood. While engaging the current viewers and ensuring that they will be return viewers, the campaign helps to attract new viewers while emphasizing an important aspect and lesson from the show.
Tracking Success
To fully measure the success of the implemented strategy on the overall goal of the campaign, the goal must be specific and measurable. For example, while the team wants to increase viewership through the PBS Kids streaming platform; what do they want to increase viewership by? For this plan, the goal can be to increase viewership by 20% during a season of the show, which is around 7-9 months, according to The Display Blog.
Specific metrics apply to tracking an increase in traffic to social platforms, these metrics include post reach, audience growth rate, potential reach, and social share of voice. (Hootsuite) Platforms such as Instagram and Facebook offer their analytic platforms to track engagement, reach, impressions, profile visits, and other metrics that are vital to tracking the overall success of posts. Trackable URLs are also able to be overlooked by Google Analytics which can show what is the main driving source behind customers viewing the Daniel Tiger website or the PBS Kids streaming website.
If most of the traffic towards the streaming website comes from Daniel Tiger’s social media pages or from PBS Kids pages to watch Daniel Tiger via streaming, PBS Kids will be well on their way to reaching the goal of increasing viewership of Daniel Tiger’s Neighborhood on the PBS Kids streaming platform.