The Britney Spears Universe: Social Media and Viral Marketing at its Best

The Britney Spears Universe: Social Media and Viral Marketing at its Best
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The Britney Spears Universe: Social Media and Viral Marketing at its Best
Britney Spears is widely recognized as being among the world’s most successful female musicians in contemporary music. Along with her crew of employees, this artist greatly relies upon various social media applications to convey messages about herself and her music, as well as to create and sustain her superstar brand image. In the year 2011, she extensively used social media applications including Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in the launch of her hit song titled Hold It Against Me and the accompanying album Femme Fatale. This paper discusses the integrated social media campaign of Britney Spears and explains whether or not it was a success. Moreover, relevant recommendations are made.
Britney Spears utilized a number of different techniques leading up to the release of her single Hold It Against Me, and each of those techniques was executed over the pop icon’s several social media platforms. She was very successful in integrating social media campaign. This is because Miss Spears was able to gain a significant number of fans on various social media platforms and sold millions of albums.
Prior to the release of the song and accompanying album, there was a leakage of a demo tape on YouTube which Miss Spears responded to on Twitter stating that if the fans think that the early demo of her new single was great, they should wait until they hear the real song the following Tuesday. Together with the early demo tape, this posting led to significant press coverage of the new song even prior to its premiere (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2012). Moreover, the singer went against the conventional strategy commonly used by artists to release new songs by releasing her music video after the new single had been released already. By doing this, Miss Spears was able to post updates regarding the progress of the video on Twitter, communicating with her numerous fans and staying active. Starting about 2 weeks prior to the grand premiere of her full music video, Miss Spears along with her crew of employees launched 1 World Premiere, 14 Teasers, 14 Days, which comprised a trailer of one teaser everyday shown on YouTube leading up to the music video’s premiere and a live discussion on MTV.com (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2012).
It is worth mentioning that all this action before the release of only a single music video is a great case in point of staying active and interesting as Kaplan and Haenlein (2012) pointed out. Being active and interesting allows the singer to make the fans feel valued and connected. All the postings in the social media platforms used by Britney Spears were written in the tone of this singer’s voice, even though not all those posts were actually written by her. The only posts on Twitter that she wrote herself had the signature ~Brit, although the other Twitter posts still maintained a sense of Britney’s personality (Kaplan & Haenlein, 2012).
Thanks to the integrated social media campaign, Britney Spears’ Hold It Against Me became her 4th number one single in the United States with 1...