Kim Townend Studio

Social Media Listening, Strategy, Trends, & Audience Insights

Fandom

Booktok & Beyond

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Last week, I gave a webinar with the social listening tool ViralMoment about how Booktok is driving cultural change in a huge way.

You can read my slides from the event below, and watch the event here.

In this deck you’ll learn:

  • Just how massive booktok is in 2024
  • Key categories (newsflash, it’s romantasy heavy!)
  • How girls are redefining what it is to be ‘bookish’
  • Booktok as an unrivalled recommendation engine
  • Alternative book communities
  • Booktok and google search trends
  • The journey of a fashion trend from booktok to the mainstream
  • How booktok is shaping our homes
  • Booktok to the screen, the return of romance!

These slides are just the highlights from my research. I analysed over a million posts, so I’m releasing a deeper dive into Booktok in the next couple of weeks. If you want to get a copy of it, sign up to my substack!

Online Third Places

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I often get notifications from Facebook about songs that I posted to the now-defunct “This Is My Jam”.


For those too young to remember, This Is My Jam was a website where you posted a song that you were listening to a lot that week/month/day/whatever.

The beauty of this site, alongside its simplicity, was that you could see who else had posted the same song, and users were prompted to share why they had posted that particular song.

This allowed you to foster a sense of connection with other real people around a piece of pop culture that meant something to you. It was a place for memories and discovery and all the good things that the internet used to be for.

I often think about the demise of third spaces IRL and what this means for society, but we’ve also lost so many of the online third places. Due to algorithmic persuasion, we’re now spending most of our time just consuming content. There are fewer and fewer places we can go to connect with other folks who share our love of a particular part of pop culture online.


I know there are Reddit, Discord, and group chats, but none have the same charm and openness as the early 00s internet. (Letterboxd is the exception to this rule and I LOVE that it goes from strength to strength.)

Sharing interests was a big part of what social used to be for, and it was a better place because of it.

Here’s hoping that over the next year, we see the advent of more of these spaces (maybe Tumblr won’t die?) and more content curators emerging to actually help us find the stuff that makes our brains go zing.

Marvel Studios’ Hawkeye: A Twitter Conversation Study

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Marvel Studios' Hawkeye A social listening and audience analysis

On November 24th 2021, Disney+ premiered their fourth big Marvel original show since launch, Hawkeye. It quickly became a huge hit, with Parrot Analytics citing it as achieving #1 peak demand rank globally on release.

But much of what we know about streaming shows comes from the US or global audience, I wanted to understand better how popular the show was in the UK in real terms and what the social conversation around the show was about.

Hawkeye was also a mega-hit in the UK, easily achieving #1 peak demand rank. Demand for Hawkeye in the UK was 33.45 times the demand for the average show across the month of December 2021. Only 0.2% of all TV shows in the market have this level of demand.

Daily Demand of Hawkeye in the UK, via Parrot Analytics

Here I’ve looked specifically at the conversation about Hawkeye that originated in the UK and was published on Twitter throughout the show’s 6 episode run.

Headline stats for the Hawkeye search on Twitter UK from November – December 25th

Although the UK conversation pales in comparison to the US conversation in terms of numbers, we can still learn plenty from this data.

This was a high number of original posts vs engagements, and although the sentiment was largely neutral, the emotion most identified in the posts was ‘joy’ (according to IBM Watson).

What People Talked About

When analysing the data for mentions of various key characters, it became clear that although Clint Barton is the protagonist, it’s really the Kate Bishop show as far as the social conversation goes. Also worth noting that although Yelena didn’t even show up until the end of Episode 4, so her character was arguably the most popular.

Clint himself only achieved a few more mentions than Kingpin who only appeared in 2 episodes.

And then looking at the actors who were mentioned in our search, we see the same story reflected. Hailee Steinfeld dominated the mentions with just under 40% of the conversation. Florence Pugh came in second with just over 30%.

These two actresses stole the show

When People Talked

The majority of the posts were published on Wednesdays (when the new episodes dropped) with the highest frequency of posts between 9-10am suggesting that the hardcore fanbase were watching the show as soon as they got up. There was another peak around lunchtime and one more between 9-11pm.

Almost all of the posts were concentrated around Wednesdays, which shows that the Disney ‘episode a week’ formula is working to create a sustained and focused social conversation (rather than Netflix’s all at once drop where we typically see 3-5 days of intense activity and then the social conversation drops off).

https://twitter.com/rj_jacksy/status/1463437689844383746

Notably, the most popular content was from fans and was Marvel fandom specific and this received higher engagement than the MarvelUK /Disney+UK official content

Who Was Doing The Talking

Given that this is a Marvel show we would usually assume that the social audience is going to be predominantly male, but it’s also a Marvel show with more powerful female characters than most. As we can see from the reporting above, both Kate and Yelena and the actors who portrayed them are mentioned over twice as many times as anyone else. This didn’t change the fact that almost 70% of the Twitter conversation came from male-identifying accounts.

Looking at the social networks that this audience is most likely to use we can ascertain immediately that they are very online.

They are over 11 times more likely than the UK baseline to be using Twitch. These are not Instagram people.

Who The Audience Clusters Were

More interesting still is that the largest interest-based community clusters in the UK are not comics people at all. They listen to Radio 1 and watch ‘I’m a Celebrity’. These folks make up over 20% of the UK conversation, the second-largest cluster (8%) are also mainstream but instead in a ‘Channel 4 News’ watching, Guardian-reading kind of way.

In fact, it’s not until we get into the smaller clusters (between 4-6% of the conversation) that we see the comics nerds and very online people begin to emerge. Here we find clusters of Twitch streamers, Gaymers and drag fans, genre fans, and ‘serious’ film fanatics.

The common denominator between all of these groups (besides Hawkeye) is that they were all using the #SpidermanNoWayHome hashtag, this indicates that these are invested MCU fans and not random people coming to the show because they are fans of the actors.

When we look at who the whole audience is following on Twitter, this hypothesis is proven correct.

Takeaways

We’ve long known (due to staggering box office numbers) that Marvel movies are no longer the province of the old Marvel comics fanboys (and girls!) but we can see that this is now also reflected in the social conversation in the UK.

Although the show was ostensibly about Jeremy Renner’s Hawkeye, Kate Bishop and Yelena Belova dominated the character conversation

The UK conversation happens as viewers watch the episodes during the Wednesday drops.

The audience, although very mainstream, are incredibly online and favours Twitch and Reddit as their social platforms of choice

Want to Find Out More?

If you’re interested in investigating a topic or audience on social media, or applying these insights to create a data-based social strategy then please…

Get In Touch!

2019: The Year That Social Media Comes Full Circle

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I haven’t written a blog post for ages. Years even. I’ve been flat out with client work and haven’t really given myself a break. I’ve started a few but never got as far as publishing them before they feel out of date. And that’s the problem. When you’re writing about social, news expires within weeks. New updates and algorithms and rules mean that what worked last month, probably doesn’t work anymore.

But recently I’ve noticed a trend that I felt compelled to comment on.

It started last year with Facebook prioritising ‘meaningful interaction’ on the Newsfeed. This algorithm update really put a spanner in the works for brands and editorial sites who had put all their eggs in Facebook’s basket. Sure, organic reach had been declining forever but this update explicitly meant that to be in with a chance of your content being seen you either had to pay for it with ads and boosts, or you had to create content that actually resonated with your audience and probably try some actual community management, not the post-and-forget-about-it style of social media management that has become so popular.

Unfortunately, this update may have kick-started the decline of Western democracy, but hey, the engagement was up by 50% year on year.

The same thing is happening with Instagram, organic reach has dropped to less than 10% for most brands, and gaming the algorithm means getting actual engagement on your posts. That’s comments and shares and tags, not the lazy double taps that don’t really mean much of anything. This was the reason more and more small business were turning to Comment Pods, to try and stay relevant.

On Twitter things weren’t quite so dire, (in terms of content, obviously Twitter has other issues it’s busy ignoring) as the algorithm was always opt-out-ish. However a series of updates over the last year focused on making conversations easier to read and engage with.

Then I saw this article being shared across social as the new big thing. Influencers! With interests! Being authentic!

This was the stage where it all started to feel a bit 2009. Remember, way back when social media was in its infancy and the entire point of using any of the platforms was to find and interact with people with similar interests? Community managers were community building for brands who were genuinely interested in connecting with their online audience and finding out what made them tick? Before social media became a flaming cesspool full of clickbait content, trolls, and badly targeted ads? Back then every deck we presented was heavy on authenticity. Faking it won’t work! We declared. Trust is the most important thing!

It’s all about community

The way that we can save social media (and quite possibly the internet) is to rewind the last 5 years and go back to caring about what we post. Create content with your audience in mind. Not everything has to appeal to everyone. Chasing reach and vanity metrics is one of the reasons that we’re in this mess. (Also, great content really helps you with organic reach)

Need more evidence that people are thirsty for long-tail content?

Interest-based communities are quietly flourishing while the big 3 try and figure out what to do

Amino, a mobile app built around fandom and communities, had as of last year over 10 million downloads on the Playstore, and user numbers keep growing.

Amino raises $45M to bring fan communities to smartphones

View Post

You all know how I feel about Tumblr being the undisputed home of fandom. Well according to SimilarWeb, Tumblr still ranks 10th globally in the Internet & Telecom/ Social Network category. (Even after the porn ban, the monthly uniques are on the way up again)

Reddit, another community where people engage around content themes (or subreddits) has been quietly growing and growing and “As of March 2019, Reddit had 542 million monthly visitors (234 million unique users), ranking as the No. 6 most visited website in U.S. and No. 21 in the world”

My point is this.

It’s still totally possible to connect with your fans online. But to do this we need to stop approaching things with a one-size-fits-all mentality. Take the time, do your research. Learn who your potential audience is, what else they like, what they use which platforms for. Then figure out what you can do to get them interested in you. Stop just pushing out content that nobody needs. Think about the user and make sure there’s a clear objective.

Years back, I used to put this simple diagram in every talk I gave

It turns out, a decade on this is still the key.

Let’s make social media in 2019 good again.

If you’ve got a project that you think I could help with please get in touch.