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If you think things go viral on the internet by luck, think again: there’s an industry gaming the system and Manchester’s Social Chain is leading the way
On a high wall in the corner of Social Chain’s Manchester office, with a look of serene exasperation, Jesus Christ looks down on the sea of millennials and Generation Zedders (or whatever the dominant term is for the under-20s this month) tapping out tweets and social media stories. The mural, which stretches across the width of the office, is a riff on Leonardo’s The Last Supper. The faces of the disciples at the table, however, are not dipped towards plates of food, but into glowing screens. There’s Luke, gawping at an Instagram story on his phone. There’s Judas, tittering into an iPad. Christ, meanwhile, stands at the centre of the table, flanked by his inattentive followers, shoulders shrugged, palms upturned in part vexation, part resignation.
It’s a fitting mural for this three-year-old startup, not because of the implication that social media turns our gaze from higher thoughts, but because it is, to use a term often heard in Social Chain’s office, relatable. Who hasn’t, at one time or another, played the role of either Jesus and Judas at the dinner table, distracted by the buzzing of their Twitter or Facebook notifications, or silently fuming at a sibling’s unending fascination with the world inside their phone?
For Social Chain, which has, with nosebleed velocity, grown from five staff to almost 200 in the space of two years and now has an annual turnover of £9m, it is a joke on which an empire has been founded. The company’s youthful employees (the head of video production joined at the age of 17) run several hundred of the UK’s most popular social media accounts covering sport, video games, fitness and food. Videos produced here, on a gleaming kitchen set that bakes in the glare of TV studio lights, are now watched more than 4.5bn times a month.
When a pun I’ve written gets 5,000 retweets it has the same effect on your brain as when a standup plays an arena show
Steve Bartlett, the company’s 25-year-old co-founder, regularly boasts to potential clients that he can make any hashtag – that is,...