How FilterCopy tailors content for different platforms while staying true to its core message?

FilterCopy adapts its content to various social media platforms, while staying true to its core message, and engaging its audience, according to Shreya Agarwal, Head of FilterCopy at Pocket Aces. 

As per Agarwal, the short-form content channel creates content that encourages organic spread through audience advocacy, employing engagement tools and it is done after considering the target audience, emotional impact, and shareability.

Speaking about how and why FilterCopy adapts its content to different social media platforms, Agarwal said that, “We have built our distribution on authenticity, consistency and our audience-first approach. We recognise that each social media platform serves a different purpose and caters to a different audience so we not only tailor our content but also our packaging to each platform. For instance, the FilterCopy sketches go up as horizontal videos on YouTube but when we repackage them for Facebook and Instagram, we make sure that the first scenes are even crisper, aspect ratios are different - basis audience behaviour on the platform, because we know we need to get audiences' attention in the first three seconds itself.”

“We even do A/B testing for thumbnails and titles to see which one is getting more organic traction before going ahead with it,” she added. 

FilterCopy, as a company, believes that progressiveness lies in normalisation, Agarwal stated.

“Media reflects and shapes mindsets and culture. As culture creators, we believe true progressiveness lies in normalised inclusivity and representation of communities that are devoid of the bias, stereotypes, or hurtful cliches that we often see in mainstream media. Reaching out to 50 million Indians weekly is tremendously powerful, and with that power comes responsibility to influence them positively,” she said. 

Agarwal went on to add that the company does it in two ways – Firstly, they try to give a voice to the communities by creating content that specifically revolves around them. “There’s a recent video - called If The World Were Better (LGBTQ+) - where we painted a picture of the perfect world where the community would be treated fairly and equally.”

Secondly, by constantly maintaining a progressive lens by casually instilling characters, nuances, themes and situations to propagate important concepts like gender equality, mental health, they try to break stereotypes and gender roles subconsciously.

“An example would be a video we did recently, called ‘Struggles Of Being A Teenager’, where our protagonist is a teenage girl who happens to have a crush on a female classmate, without labelling this as content made for the community,” Agarwal said. 

Speaking about how FilterCopy tries to grow and maintain an engaged community, Agarwal said, “We believe in data-driven creativity. Backend access is provided to every creator who is responsible to create content to see how the audience is engaging in terms of retention curve, watch time, and share velocity. We learnt this early on that if we listen to our audience, monitor their reactions on our videos, analyse their attention data and study their comments, we get a good sense of what they want to see. Different types of content pieces derive different metrics like saves, shares, comments. Our content strategy optimises for these.” 

“With all the insights we get through our distribution, we create content that will spread organically via audience members themselves. For this, we need audiences to advocate our content using engagement tools. So, we ask ourselves several questions while making every content piece - who is the main target audience/community for this content? If it is too generic or “everyone” then you don’t actually have a strong community - we think again and revise our ideas. Why will they share it? What emotion would this evoke? Which scenes/dialogues will get a share? There should be multiple such scenes/dialogues. Where will they share it? What will they say while sharing it? Good things? Bad things? Will they tag a friend? Will they say that “omg this is exactly what happens!”?” she added.

Furthermore, Agarwal went on to say that FilterCopy still doesn’t shy away from very simple themes and topics that strike a chord with the audience. “There’s so much shareability in relatability. One should not forget the basics.”

On the issue of collaborating with brands and maintaining a balance between branded content and authenticity, Agarwal shared that it is them who understand the audience and as a result also the distribution strategy. Their role, therefore, is to create content that integrates the customer point of view with advertisers’ needs, and so they try to integrate brands into the content pieces “organically, in a non-intrusive way.”

“The key rule is - each content piece should still abide by FilterCopy’s content values, thesis and ethos - if a piece of content has been made well and the integration is seamless to the story, then there is no trade-off between good content and branded content,” she added. 

Agarwal said that great things happen when the right content is created, for the right audience, with the right brand partner.

“When brands come to us with a brief, we figure out what format, frequency, themes and platform will work the best based on their target audience, objectives, messaging, timelines and budgets. We also work closely with brands on the ROI from the collaboration. Our campaigns across formats have successfully moved a needle on tangible metrics like brand awareness, consideration, Google search and brand traffic, app downloads, enquiries, followers, sales, etc,” Agarwal stated. 

Being the Head of FilterCopy, Agarwal shared that the ever-evolving audience behaviour and content preferences and platform algorithms are some of the challenges which she faces on a regular basis, but they are also very interesting, in the journey of growing the short-form content channel.

“Also, even on specific content pieces, the job doesn’t end up with creating or publishing the content; tracking the initial traction and response is key. We carefully monitor what kind of reactions it is getting. What emotion is it evoking amongst the audience? What action are they taking? We have made certain tweaks based on this in the past that have resulted in a tangible difference in the overall performance of the content. For instance, a video about a mother and son was initially titled from the POV of the son, but the comments we received in the first few hours were from women, aspiring to have a mother-in-law like her, so we quickly changed the caption to push the video within that community,” she added.