Instagram has long been Pixar’s most engaged platform, so we are constantly looking for ways to expand our audience, especially amongst younger demographics as well as innovate new formats to celebrate both the artistry of the brand as well as continue to encourage engagement amongst the passionate fans of the brand. The past year has been a continued evolution of the Pixar voice, which has become more playful, imaginative, relevant and humorous–and this is mirrored in the tactics and content formats we’ve created to find new ways of tapping into our audience and future audiences to come.
Our 2024 content strategy on Instagram focused on 3 major tactics, which we used in order to grow our following and engage our fans.
A major change we underwent this year was a shift in focus to have more fun with trends, a variety of memes, and pop culture moments. We’ve loosened our previous brand restrictions significantly over the past year and are focused on making sure the brand feels playful, from showcasing actors recreating Riley’s emotions on the Inside Out 2 red carpet, to prescribing Mike Wazowski quotes to different Zodiac signs. Pop culture, especially, is an area we’ve been incredibly excited by, as we want to make sure that Pixar is accessible to a broader demographic. One of our most popular posts of the year was a Pixar-themed spin on Taylor Swift’s much-hyped album The Tortured Poets Department, which embodies this philosophy perfectly. Music proved to be a very fun avenue for our team to explore, and we followed up with a popular twist on Spotify Wrapped, creative references to Sabrina Carpenter, Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter, and a cheeky call out to Earth, Wind, and Fire. We’re very excited to dip more heavily into this space, and we’ve also already seen positive outcomes from larger events like The Oscars, references to books, and more.
Next, we wanted to make sure that our fans were central to our brand and we’ve been able to make sure they’re given the spotlight through showcasing their amazing artwork or creative cosplays. But beyond that, we want to create social extensions that bring fans directly into the world of Pixar. A major breakthrough we had this year was getting our internal legal team to develop a framework by which we can utilize fan-created audio, which we used in this hilarious recap of the Cars movies! The D23 fan convention was also a place where we were able to tap into the fandom, both by creating content to showcase fan creativity in a trend-savvy format and to give fans information about any and all Pixar exclusive announcements. When Inside Out 2 came out, we noticed a fan who made a clay sculpture of Anxiety and were so impressed with his work that we ended up commissioning four more clay works with other emotions, which were some of our highest performing posts of the year.
Finally, we always want to center the artistry and unique culture of Pixar. A majority of our film-centric content is created with the intention of showcasing the beautiful art created at the studio, but we’re always looking for new formats, whether its creating our own spin on a collage format or taking our fans behind the scenes of how animation is created, such as in this successful spotlight on Inside Out 2. This year especially, we also wanted to bring the magic of the Pixar campus to the fans in a more direct way whether it was through showing our employees participating in trends or by doing monthly recaps of happenings on campus.
In 2024, our Instagram saw an 16% increase in followers to 11.1M followers (up from 9.6M) , with an engagement rate of 8.5%, which very much reflects our brand focus on expanding but also consistently engaging our followers. While we have always seen a lot of passion and engagement from our large millennial audience, we were excited to see an increase of over 770K followers amongst the Gen Z demographic on the account–as they will really be leaders and advocates of our brand as we move towards the future. Our efforts to bridge the gap outside the realm of only animation has also been something we’re excited about. For instance, the Taylor Swift carousel we made reached over 2.6M accounts with 21% of those belonging to non-followers. As we move forward with our efforts in the brand space, we want to find even more moments to bring Pixar to those outside our normal reach and convert more people into fans.
