Ranker: Lists About Everything
I was brought on to Ranker in 2016 to take over their Total Nerd vertical, a Facebook-lead effort that covers all things comics, video games, and genre entertainment.
Over 90% of Ranker traffic came from Facebook at the time, but Total Nerd was underperforming compared to other Ranker verticals in both growth and engagement. The team thought about shuttering the page, but knew it was important to feature entertainment content so they wanted to give it another chance with a dedicated social media editor.
By the following year, Total Nerd had doubled in size, from around 750k followers to over 1.6 million.
Average engagement per post was up around 400% of the previous average.
I found what the page was missing: a point of view. I shifted the voice of the page to a snarky but excitable persona with niche interests that loved to rile up fans with their hot takes. I used a data-driven posts to find key interest points among the audience and iterate on those successes, while abandoning topics that felt in line with the audience, like Doctor Who for example, that the audience wasn’t actually interested in. Through this method, we were even able to expand our reach. We found surprising interest in areas we hadn’t explored before, like cosplay and indie comics. By the time I left Ranker in 2017, I was leading the editorial meetings and writers rooms for Total Nerd to ensure new content would fit the new brand voice and growing audience.
The page is still active today with over 2.4 million followers.
Some other successes I’m proud of:
Starting a new vertical: Anime Underground
We tried to make some Anime content work on Total Nerd, but as we wanted to shift the audience in a more mainstream direction, I advocated for the creation of a new Facebook page and content vertical: Anime Underground.
I shaped the content and visual identity of the page from the beginning and watched it grow from 0 to over 300,000 consistently engaged followers. This page is also still active today with over 750,000 followers.
Creating custom animated content for Facebook
I partnered with on-staff editor Lily Strieff on a unique project Ranker had never tried before: custom animation.
Ranker was easing into Facebook video with slideshows and on-camera hosted segments, but hadn’t tried anything as outside the box and scripted as this before.
The video was a success, and this series helped set Anime Underground apart from competing channels.
Making ranked lists interesting
While Ranker started branching into editorial content early on, the site was conceived as the ultimate crowd-sourced ranking of anything you can think of: Best American Pop Singers, Best NFL Quarterbacks, Best HBO Series, you name it, and thousands of people have voted on Ranker.
However, these lists underperformed on social media. A simple list of “50 Best Science Fiction Authors” doesn’t stand out on a competitive and clickbait-y news feed. Still, encouraging our fans to share and vote on these lists was a big company priority.
I came up with a unique way to feature these lists in a way that intrigued fans, by framing posts around fan favorites that didn’t get the #1 spot. For example, the list of the Best Game of Thrones Couples received thousands of votes after I posted this image, and Sam & Gilly were bumped up to #4.