With the rise and rise of on-demand video streaming services, viewers of all age-groups are glued to their screens – smartphones, tablets, smart TVs, and computers. Regular television shows (priority TV, real-time shows, and catchup TV), reality TV, movies, news, documentaries, specials, biographies, originals, and more, the consumer has never had more choices.
Little surprise then, that content consumption metrics are off the charts. Yet, experts reckon, we are just getting started! As per BARC, Indians watch approximately 3 hours and 44 minutes of television content each day. Yet, it is small, compared to the average American household that watches 8 hours and 55 minutes of TV per day!
Apart from the quality, variety, and tech around content delivery (arguably the most important USPs), what keeps the audience glued, keeps them coming back, gets them talking, tweeting, conversing, and sharing is the availability of associated content.
Access to serial written episode updates show related news, previews, featured stories, serial gossips, reviews, and the entire social buzz is what keeps the audience glued.
Serial written updates or episode updates are engaging write-ups covering the key happenings and developments in an episode. It starts with an engaging and meaningful headline (which usually carries the episode number and the broadcast date) and covers the broad storylines, themes, and key plot twists in the episode.
A well-crafted serial written update also carries interesting banner images, screenshots, offer hyperlinks, or embeds videos, tweets, and highlights quotes and key dialogues – all of which further enhances engagement and adds to the recall value.
The tone of voice while writing a serial update is fast-paced and devoid of subtle nuances and descriptions. In fact, a serial written update is a crisp scene by scene description and can be considered as a written alternative to hearing a friend describe “what happened in that episode”– to keep you abreast.
Your audience today is spoilt for choice but is also pressed for time. And when they miss an episode, they get restless. They want to stay updated, and they want to stay informed. They are often so impatient that waiting for a re-run or watching a recap makes them feel short-changed! This is why serial written updates are popular. They offer a fair account of the episode and help bring them to speed.
Similarly, eager overseas fans, who are unable to catch an episode with its original broadcast and are anxious enough to not wait for the release in their time zone, also find solace (and excitement) in serial written updates.
Overall, serial written updates also offer excellent opportunities to keep the conversation going, well after the actual broadcast. User comments, fan-theories, discussions, updates, and gossips – they all happen around serial written updates.
From an online display advertising standpoint too, serial written updates offer amazing opportunities because you have an in-depth understanding of the audience, their interests, their likes, and their areas of indulgence – allowing you to select highly relevant advertisements and promotional content to display.
Content creators stand to benefit from META Tags in various ways:
Apart from serial written updates, feature stories garner significant interest and drive user engagement. These are creative, detailed, and well-researched write-ups covering movies, events, content packages, preview, reviews, interesting reading, (E.g., 12 Things You Should Know About Ayushmann Khurrana), etc., based on trending topics.
Featured stories are an excellent idea for promoting exclusive content, original series, calendar days, series/ serial milestones, etc., based on a content calendar.
Written updates and featured stories come alive with attractive banners, interesting screenshots, reference tweets and Instagram posts from the channel or the celebrities. An inhouse and image sourcing and graphic designing team ensures that each written update or featured story is punctuated with the best possible visuals.
While creating serial written updates and featured stories is great, optimizing them for search engines is highly desirable. This is made possible by following various SEO principles and writing keyword-rich content.
For example, a written update for an episode of Bigg Boss (a television reality show, which follows the Big Brother format, broadcast on Colors channel in India, can be optimized with keywords like “Bigg Boss [Season no.] day [day no.]”, “written update”, “episode no. [episode no]”, [date of broadcast] – followed by the most significant twist in the episode – E.g., Devoleena Bhattacharjee is the first queen of the house”
Writing fanfiction or reading about them is the viewers’ way of keeping the story and its characters alive. Platform generated triggers and contests can entice users to post their theories, encouraging them to reimagine scenes with different characters, altering dialogues or bringing back characters from the dead!
Fanfiction triggers your reader’s imagination and keeps them engaged. This is an opportunity to create user-generated content (the best form of content to keep them coming back!)
LexiConn has been partnering some of the most popular streaming platforms in India. We have an inhouse editorial content and graphic designing teams that can offer highly customized and relevant episodic content and DAM solutions for your platform.
Visit us www.lexiconn.in or drop us a line at content@lexiconn.in.
LexiConn also offers a free 30-minute content consultation session to help you with your content strategy.
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