From Zero to 100,000+: Building Best of Both Our Worlds From the Ground Up
What can happen when social media strategy has a seat at the table from the very beginning?
In February 2026, Best of Both Our Worlds had a name, two filmed episodes, an initial piece of AI-generated artwork, and a big idea. Less than a month later, the podcast was live with a full brand built around it. Five months later, the brand had built an audience of more than 100,000 followers and subscribers across TikTok, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, starting from zero on every platform. For Beloved Social, it has become one of our favorite examples of what social media can accomplish when it isn't treated as the final step of launching something new. Instead, it becomes part of building the brand itself.
The Official Unofficial Hannah Montana Podcast
Best of Both Our Worlds began with Jason Earles, Douglas Danger Lieblein, and Shannon Flynn wanting to create something special around the 20th anniversary of Hannah Montana for the fans. The result was Best of Both Our Worlds, the "official unofficial Hannah Montana podcast," where the people who were actually there can tell the stories behind one of Disney Channel's most defining shows.
It isn't a traditional rewatch podcast. It feels more like going to dinner with the people who made the show and finally getting to ask all the questions you've had for 20 years. The conversations start with Hannah Montana, but they regularly become something bigger: conversations about Hollywood, television production, writing, acting, directing, Disney Channel, and what actually went into creating television during that era. That's what made the opportunity particularly exciting from a brand perspective. There was already an enormous fandom. Our job was to help create something new for that fandom to belong to.
Three Weeks to Build the Digital Brand
Jason Earles initially approached Beloved Social at the end of February to help develop the social media strategy for the podcast. At that point, the team had already filmed two episodes and established the Best of Both Our Worlds name. There was an initial AI-generated direction for the branding, but the broader digital ecosystem still needed to be built. And we had weeks, not months, to do it. What started as social media startup support quickly expanded.
Beloved guided and launched the podcast's social presence from scratch, developed its ongoing social strategy, advised on the larger brand, and built bestofbothourworlds.com. Every social account began at zero. On March 17, 2026, Best of Both Our Worlds officially launched.
One week later, on March 24, the Hannah Montana 20th Anniversary Special premiered on Disney+. The timing was intentional, and it gave us an incredible opportunity to introduce something new while millions of people were already thinking, talking, posting, and reminiscing about Hannah Montana. But a cultural moment can introduce people to a brand. It can't make them stay. That became the next challenge.
From Zero to More Than 100,000
Since launching, the Best of Both Our Worlds audience has grown to:
51,000 TikTok followers
19,000 Facebook followers
18,000 Instagram followers
7,000+ YouTube subscribers
PLUS ALL THE PODCAST PLATFORM SUBSCRIBERS
Totaling more than 100,000 followers and subscribers across all platforms in approximately five months, all from accounts that started at zero. The accounts have also reached the necessary milestones to be approved for monetization across TikTok, YouTube, and Meta. But the strategy was never simply about accumulating followers. We needed to give Hannah Montana fans a reason to follow a new brand when they already had a full television series worth of content.
The answer became original content.
Nostalgia Gets Attention. New Content Builds the Audience.
One of the most important things we've learned while building Best of Both Our Worlds is that nostalgia becomes considerably more powerful when you don't simply recreate the past. You extend it.
Some of our earliest viral success came from Jason Earles filming the "BOBOW Bite," essentially stepping back into the world of Jackson Stewart for a cheese jerky review filmed at home. Fans loved it. More recently, we've seen that same response with original content featuring Mitchel Musso and the iconic cheese jerky sign.
The common denominator isn't simply that people remember cheese jerky. It's that the content feels like discovering something new from a world you thought you'd already seen in its entirety. A deleted scene. An inside joke that somehow continued for another 20 years. A character you loved as a child suddenly appearing on your For You Page in 2026.
Those moments have helped us understand what this audience wants and shape the content strategy accordingly.
Read more about Marketing with nostalgia
Building a Content Engine Around the Podcast
Of course, viral moments are only one part of building a sustainable audience. Every Tuesday, a new episode of Best of Both Our Worlds premieres, with a sneak peek beginning the conversation on Monday. Throughout the week, we're publishing at least three pieces of vertical video content across Reels, TikTok, and YouTube Shorts, often more depending on the episode, guest, and conversations happening within the community. Guests primarily include former Hannah Montana cast and crew, while the show has also begun welcoming people from the larger Disney Channel universe who have their own connection to the series.
That creates a continuous content ecosystem. The podcast fuels social. Social creates new conversations. Those conversations help us understand what the audience wants more of. And that information can influence what comes next.
Community Management Isn't an Afterthought
Publishing is only half of social media management. Every day, we're in the notifications. We're liking comments, responding when fans say something funny, answering DMs, watching what people are talking about, and engaging beyond our own accounts. That includes intentionally interacting with creators and conversations throughout the larger Disney ecosystem, from Hannah Montana and Disney Channel nostalgia to Disneyland and the broader Disney fandom. Because if you're trying to build a community, you have to actually participate in it.
That philosophy is now beginning to make its way into the podcast itself. True Friend Friday is the newest iteration of bringing the people who have supported this show into the content, creating another opportunity to make the relationship between the hosts and their audience feel genuinely two-way.
Social Strategy Became Brand Strategy
Beloved's role has also continued to evolve alongside the show. What began as social media strategy and launch support has grown to include ongoing social media management, website development, partnership outreach, audience development, and broader strategic involvement with the brand. The podcast has already secured a partnership with Vinted and signed with Audioboom for its audio representation, giving our team the opportunity to navigate the differences between traditional social partnerships and the podcast advertising ecosystem. And none of this happens in a vacuum.
Best of Both Our Worlds has been an enormous collaborative effort. Executive Producer Renee Colvert has been integral to bringing the show to life, alongside Jeff Murphy and Gina Murphy of Quest Pacifica, whose work across filming, editing, production, and graphic design makes the podcast itself possible. And at the center are Jason, Douglas, and Shannon, whose chemistry, stories, and willingness to genuinely let fans into their world give us something worth marketing in the first place.
The Bigger Lesson
There are a lot of podcasts about television shows. What makes Best of Both Our Worlds interesting is that it demonstrates what the format can become when you move beyond the rewatch. You don't necessarily need to watch an episode of Hannah Montana before listening.
Instead, you might hear how a particular joke made it from a writers' room onto television. You might learn something about working as a young actor. You might hear how television production worked in the 2000s. And occasionally, you'll get the story behind something wonderfully ridiculous, like cheese jerky. It's nostalgia, but it's also an oral history of making television.
From a Beloved Social perspective, that's what makes the growth of this brand particularly meaningful. We didn't start with 100,000 people. We started with zero. We had a cultural moment, recognizable talent, an incredibly passionate existing fandom, and a very small window to build something worthy of their attention. Then we kept showing up.
We listened to what the audience responded to. We created original content around those insights. We participated in the fandom instead of simply marketing to it. We built the infrastructure around the show. And when something worked, we learned from it rather than simply celebrating the views.
Five months later, more than 100,000 people have chosen to come along for the ride. And we're still building.