Submitted by NewGen

PewDiePie social strategy and TikTok launch

NewGen built a repurposing and editorial social strategy for PewDiePie and took him onto TikTok, where the agency reports +501K new followers on TikTok.

+8MFacebook video views
+25.4MTikTok video views
+501Knew TikTok followers

Case in 60 seconds

The page positions PewDiePie as the biggest name in the creator economy, so the task was not initial reach but serving a current audience, a lapsed audience and a new audience through one body of content at the same time.

The campaign appears to turn on the reading that audience behaviour is a property of the platform rather than of the creator, because the same PewDiePie material was reworked for each platform's viewing habits instead of being posted identically across both.

A tailored social strategy built on repurposing, editorial and strategic implementations, integrating content into existing channels so that one creator's output could be shaped to reach new, current and lapsed audiences together.

NewGen brought PewDiePie to TikTok, taking learnings from existing Facebook audiences as the stepping stone for the TikTok content distribution strategy, and across both platforms the agency's social experts tested content against platform viewing habits through more enticing introductions and animated subtitles.

NewGen reports +501K new followers on TikTok and +25.4M video views on TikTok, alongside +8M video views on Facebook, with no period stated for any of the three counts.

Strategy Breakdown

The primary strategy-learning section — interpretation, not a press-release summary.

A new audience alongside PewDiePie's current and lapsed audience, reached across Facebook and TikTok.
Based on the available evidence, the challenge was one of saturation rather than awareness, because a creator described as the biggest name in the creator economy has already reached the people most likely to find him, so growth had to come from lapsed viewers and from a platform he was not yet on.
A tailored social strategy built on repurposing, editorial and strategic implementations, integrating content into existing channels so that one creator's output could be shaped to reach new, current and lapsed audiences together.
The page states that the agency experimented with content to suit the viewing habits of each platform's audiences, which suggests a working assumption that the same viewer behaves differently on Facebook than on TikTok and that the opening seconds and on-screen text carry that difference.

Creative & Execution System

Assets & channels

  • Facebook
  • TikTok
  • video

Partners

  • NewGen (lead_agency)

Creator role

  • PewDiePie — creator

Results & Evidence

MetricValueResult type
Facebook video views+8M VIDEO VIEWS ON FACEBOOKvideo_views
TikTok video views+25.4M VIDEO VIEWS ON TIKTOKvideo_views
new TikTok followers+501K NEW FOLLOWERS ON TIKTOKfollower_growth

Why NewGen's strategy worked

  1. 1

    Insight from an established platform audience can seed entry to a new one, because NewGen used what it knew about existing Facebook audiences as the starting point for the TikTok distribution strategy rather than building that platform from nothing.

  2. 2

    Repurposing works as a strategy rather than a cost saving where the edit changes with the surface, which is what the reworked introductions and animated subtitles appear to be doing across the two platforms.

  3. 3

    A creator at maximum scale is addressed through segmentation rather than expansion, because the stated aim was to reach new, current and lapsed audiences at once rather than simply to add reach.

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