Like most successful recording artists, the COVID-19 outbreak in March brought everything — live concerts, recording, and fan events — to a screaming halt. After the initial shock of lockdown, Chris Mann got busy creating coronavirus parody videos that unintentionally went internationally mega-viral.
In addition to using Facebook and YouTube to distribute the videos, I also looked at ways to make the video content evergreen, grow his fanbase, allow fans to participate, show his lesser-known comedic personality, and tap into the cultural conversation around the COVID-19 outbreak.
While we had previously used GIPHY, the animated Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) hadn’t been, up to that point, a priority social platform for our digital content, culture, or community strategy.
Fast forward a pandemic and five months later, and we’ve seen the GIPHY channel grow from a couple of thousand GIF views to nearly 14 Million GIF views (as of this post) in just a few months.
Over on Medium, I wrote up a small case study sharing the content, culture, and fandom strategies I’ve learned from growing the GIPHY channel from nearly zero to 14 million GIF views.