SOCIAL MEDIA STRATEGY
What working on global entertainment brands taught me about attention.
Agency-side social strategy experience across entertainment brands including Disney and Marvel.
01 — THE CHALLENGE
Big audiences don't guarantee attention.
Entertainment brands may begin with enormous awareness and established fandoms, but social still has to earn its place in the feed.
The work taught me to think beyond simply publishing branded assets and instead ask: why would someone stop, react, share or join in?
02 — THE THINKING
Make brands behave like accounts people want to follow.
Working agency-side helped shape the principles I now bring to social strategy:
Platform first
An idea needs to belong where it's being published.
Find the hook
The first job of creative is earning the next second of attention.
Use the fandom
Great entertainment social understands the behaviours, references and conversations already happening around the brand.
React, don't only schedule
Not every valuable piece of content begins three weeks earlier in a calendar.
Create participation
Comments, conversation, UGC and community are part of the creative opportunity — not an afterthought.
THE ATTENTION CHECKLIST
5 questions before anything goes live.
Does it belong here? · What's the hook? · Why would the fandom care? · Why now? · What can people do with it?
03 — WHAT I WORKED ACROSS
What that experience looks like in the work.
Social strategy — deciding what a brand should talk about and why
Social-first concepts — ideas designed for feeds, not resized campaigns
Hooks & copy — earning the first second and carrying attention
Reactive content — finding culturally relevant moments worth joining
Campaign thinking — turning one idea into a broader social system
Fandom strategy — creating with existing audience behaviour rather than talking over it
The part I bring to your brand:
BIG-BRAND THINKING, WITHOUT THE BIG-BRAND BUREAUCRACY.
Strategy built to earn attention - whether you're speaking to 500 people or 5 million.
04 — THE TAKEAWAY
Attention isn't owed to a brand. Even a famous one.
That experience now informs the way I approach smaller brands too: start with the audience, understand the platform and create something worth interrupting the scroll for.
You don't need Disney's audience to use the same attention principles.
I bring social-first strategy, hooks, campaign thinking and platform-native creative to brands that want people to actually care.
GET IN TOUCH
© 2026 Zaynab Merchant
zaynab@zaynabmerchant.com