SHARING TO STORIES
Peloton
Driving social discovery and community with Sharing to Stories
OUR STORY
Revolutionizing the fitness landscape
Peloton is a global interactive fitness platform that brings the energy and benefits of studio-style workouts to the convenience and comfort of home. With live and on-demand classes taught by a roster of elite instructors, we deliver real-time motivation and curated playlists from the world's best artists. Our immersive content is accessible through the Peloton Bike/Bike+, Peloton Tread/Tread+, and the Peloton App. With instant access to classes, performance tracking metrics, and a motivating real-time leaderboard, we’re changing the way people get fit through a comprehensive and socially connected-experience.
OUR GOAL
Growing word-of-mouth through social
Social media is a powerful tool for us to engage with both current and potential Peloton Members. When Peloton Members share their Peloton experiences to third party social platforms, they help drive word-of-mouth awareness among their friends and family who may or may not be Peloton Members. While we have sharing of Peloton content enabled for Facebook posts, we wanted to grow sharing on more social platforms like Instagram to help grow awareness and familiarity of Peloton.
OUR SOLUTION
Iterating across teams to integrate with Instagram Stories
We wanted to be where our Members are—on Instagram, so we looked into ways to integrate with Instagram Stories with the Sharing to Stories feature. At the beginning of summer 2020, two interns from our API team kicked off the initial integration of Instagram Stories and the Peloton App. They added several new endpoints to Peloton’s API that generated and returned media assets, including custom ones like the sticker overlay that displays a Member’s workout stats. They also updated the iOS app to call these endpoints and return the media assets to Instagram.
After three months of development and testing, we successfully released the initial feature to share to Instagram Stories. The API team then went back and dedicated an additional month to iterate on the feature. They also enabled Peloton’s Creative and Marketing teams to use unique campaign images and videos in the background from specific classes when they are shared, instead of the default video backgrounds.
During the development of this feature, we also had a learning moment working across teams. We typically follow a waterfall approach where finalized deliverables are handed off from team to team, but took a more iterative approach for this project, allowing our Engineering and Creative teams to work in parallel. Throughout this process, we learned how crucial it is to have continuous cross-team communication, and designing with flexibility in mind, in order to successfully complete the project.
When we were ready to launch, we turned to our marketing channels to educate our Members on the new sharing feature, inclusive of an announcement email, blog post, in-app notification, Instagram post, and of course, Instagram Story. We were excited to see a lot of interest from our Members and press in the integration. We were even more excited to then expand this feature to our Android Members in November 2020.
OUR SUCCESS
Empowering community and discovery
Enabling sharing to Instagram Stories in the Peloton App has helped to empower our community so that they can widely share and celebrate their accomplishments and achievements. Since launching in September 2020, more than half a million Instagram Stories have been created from the Peloton app from 89,000 Members. In addition to community, this has helped current and potential Peloton Members discover the variety of classes that you can access through Peloton. From types of music, to new disciplines, to new instructors, it helps illustrate through third parties that there’s a class type for everyone.
This integration has also helped us meet our Members where they are, by giving them more options to share on social media. Since launching, over ⅔ of our Members’ first time social shares were to Instagram Stories. We’re excited to offer our Members more ways to share their classes and workouts with their friends and family!
- Over half a million Instagram Stories created since launch
- ⅔ of Peloton Members sharing to social media for the first time were to Instagram Stories
“ We’re excited to offer our Members more ways to share and celebrate their workout accomplishments through Instagram Stories, a channel where we see the most organic in-the-moment post workout sharing. Building Sharing to Instagram Stories directly into our iOS and Android apps allowed us to make that sharing experience more seamless.