DMG's head of social creatives, Ellie Beetham, has built an "Avengers" team of creator and social-savvy journalists that has helped its key brands hit 26m TikTok followers in two and a half years
One Monday morning in early 2024, Ellie Beetham saw the extraordinary potential of news content on TikTok.
The Baltimore Bridge had collapsed, and she quickly turned around some video content for the Daily Mail's TikTok channel, continuing to cover it throughout the day. In the end, the TikTok account gained 175,000 followers in 24 hours.
If that's what's possible with simple breaking and reactive news content, imagine what could happen with a dedicated team of social-first specialists.
Over the last two and a half years, the Daily Mail's TikTok channel grew from 4 million to 26 million followers. While the team was very good at understanding how social works, it wanted to shift away from chasing viral moments and start building repeatable, trusted formats. The key idea: becoming more instantly recognisable.
Beetham, as DMG Media's head of social creatives, has been in charge of a new team of 25 creators – a mix of ready-made influencers and traditionally trained journalists adept at social – working across DMG Media's 10 key brands on TikTok, including the Mail and the Metro.
"When I was growing up in broadcasting, I wasn't able to do anything like this because social just wasn't treated as importantly as other news platforms," Beetham explains, adding she cut her teeth in the UK's major broadcasting newsrooms like Bauer, Global, and Sky News.
"My younger self would have loved being in this generation. So I'm so glad that I can lead a team that's able to do that."
Young creators and news creators are often better suited to tell stories on social platforms. They have a knack for storytelling that hasn't been trained out of them in journalism school.
Only now, she's giving these creators the institutional backing of a giant like DMG Media with fresh investment in the production side — graphic designers who rebranded the look of the channels, a videography team, editors, and a swanky new studio kitted with all the essentials for original, polished and, crucially, adaptable, social-first content at scale. That includes lighting presets so that presenters have different backdrops behind them, depending on the video and brand they're working on.
Beetham describes her talent roster of 25 creators fondly as her "Avengers". For the non-Marvel fans out there, it means she's recruited and nurtured a set of in-house video specialists, all with distinct personalities, skill sets and specialities optimised for social platforms like TikTok.
