Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

The Blog

Ten Principles for Regenerative Social Marketing

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During the time I’ve spent working specifically in social, I’ve often come across a type of person (both agency and client-side) who is looking for a quick-fix, maybe doesn’t really see the worth in organic, figure ads could do the job, and doesn’t put much stock in brand or strategy beyond look and feel.


This approach might get you where you need to be during the first 12 months, but it’s not sustainable, doesn’t allow space to grow, and you burn through your potential audience quickly.


The type of social marketing that I encourage my clients to practise is much more sustainable and generative. It allows time and space to investigate and understand your brand, your audience and the right social space for you. It helps you grow, but not at the expense of longevity and turning your audience into a community. It’s respectful of people’s time and attention and never just publishes identical copy and content across every channel.


To clarify what I mean when I talk about generative marketing on social, I’ve created a list of 10 simple principles I adhere to.

  1. Authenticity above all else.
  2. Identify your specific audience (s)
  3. Cultivate community
  4. Work with the algorithms, but don’t be at their mercy
  5. Great content lives in the space between your audience interests and your brand values
  6. Don’t be too concerned with what your competitors are doing
  7. Great social is more than great creative
  8. Sales doesn’t have to be gross if you don’t make it feel gross
  9. ‘Always on’ doesn’t have to equal burnout.
  10. Behave like a good human

I use social intelligence to get to grips with your audience and interests and the spaces they play in, and I take the time to work with my clients to nail who their brand is and what that means for how they behave on social.

If you take the time to get your social strategy right, it will serve you for years to come. The execution/tactics will undoubtedly need updating as the platforms change their algorithms and favourite content types on a whim. But the core strategy should remain sound.

In a world of content overload and social same-ification, fostering and building connections is the best way to succeed. Please get in touch if you like the idea of working together to make that happen!

How I’m using ChatGPT to improve my audience insights and social strategies

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You’re probably a bit bored of ChatGPT posts already, I don’t blame you. I am too. Right now there’s lots of conversation about massive future scenarios, and much less about how we can use the tool as is to make our jobs easier and our research better.

This chart shows Twitter mentions of ChatGPT since it appeared at the end of last year.
7 million+, is a lot of Twitter mentions. Data from Pulsar: Trends.

I’ve been playing around with ChatGPT for a little while, and these are some of my initial thoughts on how I’m using it, and the gaps it can plug in my social listening/audience intelligence projects.

So far, I’ve found that ChatGPT provides me with some excellent starting points to make my own research and analysis better. I use it as a first step before setting up searches in other tools where I can access the data set and understand the whys and the hows.

I’m going to share with you the top three things I’m using ChatGPT for right now, and how they have improved my process.

1. Better Desk Research

I like to work on projects that I’m already interested in, but that can’t always be the case and sometimes I need to understand some key basics about a given category to get me thinking about how I’m going to go about my work.

I was tempted to call this ‘in place of search’ but it’s not in place of search, it’s just become the first step in my process.

Instead of starting with Google, I’ll now ask ChatGPT to give me 4-5 paragraphs on things I should know about subject X. I’ve found this to be more useful than search in the very early stages, but I will usually go on to search around key areas or sub-categories that have been surfaced by my initial prompt.

2. Better Audience Segmentation

Sometimes there’s no budget to run a full social audience insights project, sometimes the communities you want to understand aren’t active on platforms that allow listening, and sometimes you want a broad idea about who the segments might be before you put together a social search to understand them better.

In these cases, it’s really useful to be able to understand some simple audience segmentation to start thinking about how you might cluster your audience groups and the types of content that might resonate with each.

Here, I asked ChatGPT to give me audiences and category needs around ‘alcohol-free’ related content.

As you can see, it delivered back a pretty comprehensive list of audiences and content types that I should be considering, however without audience sizes I would still have to run a social trends search to understand which of these clusters was worth a deeper dive.

I can also delve further into these segments to understand things like

  • What are they likely to be reading?
  • Which social networks are they likely to use?
  • Who are the key influencers in this space?

I’ve now got some good starting points to really begin my research, and I can sense check anything that feels wrong or off using a combo of social/search/third party data.

I’ve also saved myself a good amount of time that can now be spent honing my search or strategy.

3. Better Boolean Strings

The final thing I want to talk about here is how useful ChatGPT is, if you deal in social listening or audience intelligence, and spend your time putting together the most comprehensive boolean search strings that are possible.

Once I’ve got a better understanding of the audiences, topics and segments, in the same chat I might ask to have a boolean string with a specific outcome in mind generated.

This is a first attempt at a simple search string based on the topic I’d been researching. I could go on and create a more natural language-style search in ChatGPT, or I can take this great starting point and rewrite it so it includes the specificities and exclusions that only a human would consider. (You would be amazed at how much K-Pop finds its way into almost every Twitter search)

Being able to do all this desk research beforehand hopefully means that you’re not going to have to spend quite as long cleaning the data either.

Limitations

All of this is great, right? Well, mostly but there are some very obvious drawbacks that need to be considered. Firstly the timeline

ChatGPT’s most recent training data only runs until September 2021, so if you’re looking for new trends/up-to-date info about influencers or social networks then this is not the right tool for you.

It is much better with global data than anything territory specific, this varies from topic to topic, but I have found it to be somewhat limiting when it comes to understanding location-specific categories

Oh, and there’s the big one where I can’t see the data and check its accuracy. If I can’t click through to the post or use my own sarcasm filter, I’m not going to be happy presenting this to a client.

So…?

I’ve only been using ChatGPT for a short while and I’m sure that over the coming months, I’ll figure out better ways to use the tool. For now, I’m excited about the possibilities, but like any decent strategist, I’ll take any insights that I can’t access the raw data behind with a pinch of salt.

It won’t replace desk research, and it will certainly not replace humans when it comes to insights, but it’s an extremely useful productivity tool with a million use cases that probably haven’t even been dreamed up yet.

If you’re interested in learning more about how you can use ChatGPT in your strategy/audience work, then I recommend Prompt from Audience Strategies – a veritable bible for this kind of work and extremely reasonably priced.

Social Listening, Insight and Strategy, in that order. 9 Key Takeaways

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A social strategist’s guide for marketers, advertisers and comms experts

Earlier this year I wrote a post over on Pulsar platform explaining how social listening works, what you should be looking for and why it’s still so important.

I’ve included one of my favourite takeaways (that I wish more people understood).

4. Using listening just to monitor your brand & competitor mentions? You’re missing out on the good stuff

Many brands are still using their own mentions and competitor benchmarking as the basis for their social strategies, and although this makes for an excellent KPI, it’s a teeny tiny part of the story. Brand watching lags, but staying abreast of attitudes and behaviors helps us anticipate what’s next, stay ahead of trends, and be proactive rather than simply reactive. 

Think beyond traditional marketing plans and learn about what matters to your brand, not just what’s said about it. 

And if you’re interested you can read the whole post below, or visit Pulsar Platform for more info

Social Listening, Insight and Strategy, in that order. 9 Key Takeaways

Social Media Witches

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Want to know more about modern witches, and how they manifest on social media?

Sure you do! Take a look at this piece on Pulsar that I did the set-up and research for. It’s a real deep dive into the world of witches, their platform-specific behaviours and the themes that move them. 🧙‍♀️ We delve into the aesthetics, the rituals, and map the audience. Also, we briefly touch on mushroomcore and all the mycelium magic that goes along with it.

UPDATE:

Unfortunately, the full post is no longer available, but here are some of the topline findings from the project.

There were four main cultural interests within the witch conversation on social.

There were a myriad of witch subcategories and each had a channel preference, some witch types were more spiritual, some more aesthetic, and some appealed more to baby witches, vs the more experienced practitioner.

https://www.pulsarplatform.com/blog/2022/witches-are-real-and-theyre-on-tiktok/?curator=MediaREDEF

Who Are The UK Euphoria Social Fandom?

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Season Two of Euphoria has proved nothing short of a global phenomenon. It’s become the most tweeted about TV show of all time, and the second most-watched show in the history of HBO.

As in my last post, I’m going to use social listening to understand who is talking about the show in the UK. Most of the press coverage I’ve read has been from middle-aged journos who are exhausted/traumatised from just watching the show. A theme that started at the beginning of the first season – but who are the show’s actual fans and what do they think?

For this project, I’ve analysed the Twitter conversation using #Euphoria originating in the UK from Feb 1st until the season finalé.

I looked at 9.1k original posts, which generated 50k engagements and 23 million impressions.

This is interesting in itself, as it indicates that people are sharing and liking others’ content much more than creating their own. It also tells us that many of the fans are tweeting tens of times per week about the show. In fact, there were only 15.1k unique authors in the entire search, further enforcing the idea that this fandom shows their love through others’ creations.

Who are the Euphora fandom?

The first thing to note is that these fans are rabid. Many of them live-tweeted the show, with one fan tweeting about the show an incredible 702 times during the final month of the show being on air.

The overall audience is more than 70% female and almost 50% of them live in or around London.

This audience has no particular influencer/celebrity affinities, only 27% of them are following Zendaya and 30% Ariane Grande and these are the two most common affinities.

Here instead we are seeing at least 7 disparate groups of people who aren’t particularly connected, all talking about the show in their own way.

For example, the LGBTQA+ audience are primarily male, and they talk more about Rue than any other character, whereas the Glaswegian cluster who were 3 x as likely to be female talked more about Fez.

Other interesting findings included the discovery of a cluster of female wrestling enthusiasts (both females who wrestle themselves and fans of female wrestlers) who over-index on Twitch use. These folks are more interested in talking about Rue and Maddy than anything else.

Social listening audience analysis of the UK Euphoria Fandom

When are they online?

As we’ve seen before, the strategy of weekly episode drops is one that works particularly well for driving social conversation, as these fans tend to live tweet/next day tweet the show and then not really talk about it until the next episode. This ensures the social longevity of the conversation.

When we see shows releasing all episodes of a season at the same time (the Netflix model) we tend to see a hyper-concentrated mass of posts for 7-10 days after the initial release date, and then the conversation fades away almost entirely.

Which social platforms do they favour?

Looking at the audience as a whole we see that they over-index on using most social platforms, but that Snapchat, Spotify, Reddit and Twitch come top.

It’s interesting that Reddit is here, as I’m seeing it show up more and more in searches you wouldn’t expect it to be dominant, a testament to the ever-growing importance of Reddit as a platform.

Which characters do they like?

You might expect a huge number of the posts to mention Zendaya, considering just how popular she is right now, but only 388 original posts even mention her by name/hashtag. This compares to the almost 1k posts that talk about Rue (the character she portrays) suggests that this audience are far more interested in the characters and their stories than the actors who are playing them.

I analysed mentions of the character names over the last 5 episodes.

The first noteworthy thing is that 74% of the total posts about the show mentioned at least one character. This is a super high percentage of character posts and confirms that it’s the characters and their stories that are at the core of this show for the fans.

Rue was the fan favourite, but Fez was just behind her in terms of volume, with Cassie and Lexi following next.

When I looked specifically at the last episode, Ashtray and Fez each generated 25% of the overall conversation.

What was surprising was the lack of conversation around Nate Jacobs – for a toxic character that fans love to hate, he receives under 9% of character mentions.

Outside of the conversation around the show, I discovered that over 25% of the analysed audience were using “gorgeous gorgeous girls” regularly, and a slightly smaller number were creating content around the feminine urge. Understanding the memes that resonate with your community early on, allows you to create the right kind of content and be accepted by the fandom as you can speak the same language.

What content do they create and share?

This is a selection of the most shared and liked posts. This show is a perfect demonstration of how posts become viral. Someone with 34 followers posts content that resonates with other fans, and within a day it has over 200k likes.

Interestingly we see no official or ‘critic’ based content in the best performing content, because although these publishers have huge platforms, what they’re writing is not resonating with the fandom.

What matters to them?

I wanted to identify the core themes that came up when people talked about Euphoria. I started by looking at the keywords that were most often used by the (older) TV journos. I looked for posts that talked about it being hard to watch, and the abusive nature of the relationships, but there were so few it was negligible.

What did become apparent was that the fans of the show talk about love, and friendship and how much the show moves them (often to tears). And for a show with the tagline ‘feel something’ I would consider that a resounding success.

Takeaways

  • There appears to be a real disconnect between the fans’ and the critics’ opinions
  • Although critics may dominate the conversation in terms of impressions – their thoughts on the show are often completely misaligned with what the fans say
  • The fans exist in their own social world clusters and their only real common talking point is the show
  • Up to the minute memes are the perfect way for the fandom to communicate in real time
  • HBO understand and facilitate this by ensuring that the most memeable moments of each show are instantly available on their official Giphy channel
  • The reason for the success is that the show makes its viewers feel something. This is echoed in the social listening data. (If you’re interested, here’s a great video essay about this point)
  • HBO UK share content about their own show, but don’t seem to understand what the fans like about it/how they talk. For example, they tweeted asking people to sum up Fez and Lexi’s relationship – but don’t use any of the popular ship names that fans are using
  • Each social platform has a community who talks about Euphoria. Here we’ve looked only at Twitter, but the Instagram Euphoria community is filled with beauty influencers, the TikTok community love the fashion and to point out how unrealistic the whole thing is. This kind of information is invaluable when thinking about how to shape your social strategy

Why do these social listening insights matter?

By really understanding who your potential social audience is, what they like /what they don’t, you can create strategies that work. Your content can live in that magic social space between brand goals and audience interests. You can identify possible pain-points, influencers and detractors, and utilise these in your plan. You can understand when they’re online, who you need to advertise to and who you don’t so your paid social campaigns are more effective.

There are so many things you can learn when you undertake a social listening or audience mapping project. It’s not limited to social strategy, but I wouldn’t create a social strategy without social listening.

As always, if you’re interested in learning more about any online topic, or you want help with creating a social strategy that will resonate with the people you want to reach then please get in touch!