Social media is packing a big punch for The Family Stallone, helping it become the biggest reality-show premiere on Paramount Plus and powering it to a rapid renewal for a second season.
From a standing start, the series, featuring Rocky star Sylvester Stallone and his wife and daughters, amassed 3.2 million social media followers, going past 600,000 on TikTok, 240,000 on Instagram and 450,000 on Facebook at this time.
In terms of social media followers, that makes The Family Stallone the No. 1 new reality show across all of television for 2023, behind only HBO’s The Last of Us among all TV series, according to Paramount.
It is also the fastest-growing Paramount Plus show on social media and the quickest to reach 1 million followers across platforms.
The final episode of season one of The Family Stallone streams Wednesday, with a scene of Stallone and his family climbing the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, made famous at the end of the training montage in the first Rocky film. (See video.) That’s sure to be a popular social media moment as well.
The huge social media following should make it easier to build an audience for season two, which will start shooting later this summer, Ann Lamore, VP, marketing & social media, at Paramount Media Networks and MTV Entertainment Studios, told Broadcasting+Cable.
Sponsors should also be drawn to the show’s social media audience. “Heading into season two, I just know we’re going to have sponsorships attached,” she said.
Lamore said that social media is always a part of the plan when MTV Entertainment Studios launches a new show. Paramount Plus put some promotional dollars into pushing the show’s trailer, but the effort on the MTVE side was organic. “It’s basically word-of-mouth,” she said.
To get additional assets to share before the show had its debut, the studio did a digital shoot with the Stallone daughters, Sistine, Sophia and Scarlet, to collect bite-sized, snackable moments. “But we knew that show footage was going to be the break and butter for this series,” Lamore said.
The show first launched its social presence on Instagram and TikTok, because it has become difficult to grow followers on Twitter and Facebook.
Having a big star like Sylvester Stallone made potential viewers curious about the show. But the show also got a boost because Stallone’s daughters all had their own significant social media followings and because MTVE gave them content for promoting the show on their own handles.
The content was short. ”People aren’t sitting on their phones watching long-form content for new series,” Lamore said. And it quickly emerged that viewers were interested in the family dynamics, which were relatable.
MTV’s research and analytics department helped steer the social media team towards these themes and clips that resonated.
“We basically work hand-in-hand with our research team,“ Lamore said. ”We read the comment on a daily basis and our community managers understand what the fans want. Once an episode airs, we clip up the episode and pick those big moments to seed out to our audience.”
Research also showed that words superimposed over the video clips also heightened interest.
One clip that resonated shows the Stallone daughter discussing what dating was like when your dad is Sylvester Stallone. The dating story is approaching 14 million views on TikTok, making it the most popular social clip of the year among all shows to premiere in 2023.
Once clips from the show started appearing, the algorithms started pushing them to young viewers who were likely to be interested in the show.
Another popular clip showed Sylvester Stallone and Al Pacino trying to take a selfie.
More recently, MTVE launched social media handles for the show on Facebook, which quickly attracted followers. “The Facebook page is actually taking off as well,“ Lamore said. “We’re already up to 455,000 followers.”
Lamore said that all of the streaming audience data for The Family Stallone hasn’t come in yet, but on social media, the promotional effort is reaching a target audience of young viewers 18 to 24. Launching Season 2 of the series should be easier with an established social presence.
MTVE will have another digital shoot to create social media content, Lamore said.
“The biggest thing for season two is we have a playbook, we have sort of a cheat sheet, and know to capitalize on the family dynamic. That’s what the audience wants and that’s what we’re going to hone in on,” she said.
She said it was hard to compare the social media footprint of The Family Stallone to any other new show that has come from the company. RuPaul’s Drag Race has a vibrant social-media footprint, but that show has been on for 16 seasons.
RuPaul’s Drag Race has been able to monetize its social media following with several sponsors.
“We’re going to be able to pitch ideas to sponsors about content that we’re producing and putting out on our channels and hopefully they’ll want to be attached to them,” she said.