With all the drama, and of course love, that Married at First Sight (MAFS) showcased each Sunday to Wednesday night, fans turned to social media to engage with the show’s talent and throw in their two cents on the events that took place, reports Nielsen social analyst Remy Brunelli-Brondex.
Nielsen has reported MAFS season six saw more than six million social interactions across Twitter, Facebook and Instagram – a 421% increase on season 5. MAFS fans took to their second-screens as all the pivotal moments unfolded, with over 80% of social interactions occurring while the program aired.
Married At First Sight talent instagram posts and interactions
A key element of MAFS social success and strategy was the ability for fans to follow and engage with the show’s talent on Instagram. When looking at share of engagement across network, program and talent, over 62% of social interactions was with MAFS talent accounts, this is more than double the share of engagement when comparing the average across other reality series programming for talent at 27%.
Karen Madden, Nine’s group marketing director, said: “We knew we had amazing content for this year’s season of MAFS. We built a social strategy to enable our audience to interact and engage with the show and it’s participants on our official accounts as a true second screen experience. We engaged with the audience by building relationships on all our @MAFS accounts, the participant’s accounts and through the encouragement of fan conversation on other platforms.
“Based on experience from previous years, we proactively worked in partnership with the show participants to curate their content ensuring we could deliver a safe environment by moderating and managing the huge amount of conversation happening across social. This proved an extremely successful approach, seeing participant accounts grow by more than three million followers over the course of the series.
“The growth, engagement and conversation to and from our participants helped drive discussion around the show and audience viewing across Channel 9 and 9Now.”
The chart below ranks the MAFS talent accounts based on total social interactions, and highlights that fans couldn’t get enough of Martha, not only generating the most interactions, but also the highest engagement per post. While Jules and Ning posted the most during the show, their average engagement per post is lower. This type of analysis can help social teams and TV networks fine-tune their content creation and social strategy to maximise fan engagement.
