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The Rise and Rise of Cosy Culture

Kim · May 1, 2024 ·

This post is a deep dive into cosy culture, and a written version of my talk from the Si Lab Trends summit in April this year.

From adjective to lifestyle: The cosy convergence

I know that cosy is nothing new; it’s been a word we have used to describe a particular feeling for hundreds of years. In this post, I will look at the shift we’ve seen since the pandemic, from cosy as a descriptor to cosy as a lifestyle.


One of the things that I uncovered during this project was how many previously disparate themes now have an outwardly cosy element (largely thanks to social). I’m calling this the cosy convergence.

We’ll explore what it is, why it matters, how it’s manifesting on social media, and how you can use social listening insights to tap into it.


Between September 1st 2023 and April 1st 2024, across 
Pinterest, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, Twitch, Threads, and Reddit there were 63,095,396 mentions of cozy/ cosy which generated 1,859,322,923 engagements.

So how does cosy show up on various social channels?

Volume of Mentions Vs. Volume of Engagements by Kim Townend

The chart embedded above is interactive, so you can see the exact number of both mentions and engagements per platform.

First we’re looking at the volume of mentions, so how many posts we’re seeing around cosy on each platform.


Pinterest is the clear leader here, with forty-nine million thirty-six thousand six hundred twenty-four mentions, more than five times the amount of the closest competition. (it’s not uncommon for Pinterest to outperform other platforms, particularly if the topic being analysed is more traditionally female facing and lends itself to images)

But when we look at where the engagements are happening it’s an entirely different story. Although TikTok was only responsible for 969k mentions, it generated 1.8 billion engagements during our search. YouTube generated 60 million engagements. None of the other platforms even came close to these levels of engagement. This is a clear indication that video (and more particularly short form video) rules both social media and cosy culture.

Now that we know cosy culture is definitely a thing happening on social, we want to understand if it’s exclusive to social.

The first step in understanding whether a trend is bigger than just social is to see if it’s made the leap to search.

This chart shows the global search data around simply the word ‘cozy’ over the last 
five years. The search trend is extremely seasonal, but it’s on a steady upward trajectory and the 
forecast is positive.

Cool, so what is cosy culture exactly?

Cosy culture is strange because it’s fast culture (as defined by Grant McCracken) and it’s slow culture, and it’s heavily seasonal.

The slow culture part of it means it’s incredibly broad and accessible, the same way there’s a (tik)Tok for everything, there’s a cosy for everything.

These headlines are all signals from the last year on various cosy subtrends that journos are writing about, but alongside these flash-in-a-pan-are-they-even-really-trends, the social data also shows us a move towards longevity and a cultural shift inward. Fast cosy culture can be used in your social, but is best as resposive content that captures a fleeting moment.

These slow culture signals are the cosy themes that have longevity, those rooted in tradition over fad. They tap into bigger human behaviours and desires and, as such, are better suited to a longer-form social strategy.

How is cosy playing out on social?

Who is talking about cosy things?

With a subject as big as this, I don’t usually pay too much attention to demographics, as they become more valuable as we cluster the audience.
However, I ran the audience to see if anything stood out immediately. This is what I found.

  1. The audience is very, very female.
  2. It’s the female audience who are responsible for the seasonal aspect of the trend, the male conversation is reasonably consistent throughout the year.
  3. The audience is truly global with a concentration in the US and the UK.
  4. The audience skews heavily younger millennial.

To begin my analysis, I grouped my data into eight broad themes that I saw repeatedly recurring. These were fashion, home, which encompasses all things house-based, including interior design and soft furnishings, the aesthetic, books/reading,TV and movies, gaming, music, and food.

How the Cosy Themes Manifest on Different Social Platforms. by Kim Townend


When dealing with multiple social networks, I look at something other than the cumulative volume of the themes as one platform can dominate and skew the data. As we saw before, Pinterest is that platform in this search. To better understand this, I’ve examined how cosy manifests on different social networks.


When writing social strategy, this kind of data is invaluable in helping me figure out which platforms are the most important to which communities and where the brand or business I’m working with should focus its efforts.


As you can see, Pinterest, TikTok, Twitter, and YouTube all have a very high percentage of home-based content, whereas Twitch and Reddit favour gaming more. This is immediately helpful to me in understanding where I should deep-dive on specific topics or where my brand should concentrate its ad spend.

Diving deeper I then look to understand two more things: which themes were more seasonal in nature/ which were more stable and secondly, how the overall engagement mapped against the themes.

The graph above shows the timeline and the associated themes, you’ll see that ‘home’ has the biggest seasonal drop-off, fashion, aesthetic, and food have smaller drops, and gaming, TV & movies, and music, remain consistent throughout the year.

This suggests that while the more significant themes are seasonal, they continue growing each year and introducing smaller trends into their canon. The consistency around TV, music and gaming shows that these smaller trends are becoming sub-genres in their own right.

When i mapped this against engagement three things became clear:

  1. Level of engagement shows no correlation to volume of mentions. This has only really happened since the explosion of short-form video. When text/images were the default social content, engagement would usually follow a pretty similar line to mentions.
  2. Most of the huge spikes of engagement are driven by just one piece of content.
  3. Nine times out of ten that content is coming from either TikTok or YouTube

The Subgenres of Cosy

This blog post is already quite long, so I’m just going to do a top line look at the themes that were more consistent.

Books

  • The only search that over-indexed in the UK spelling of cosy. A big UK audience but also many Anglophiles
  • Twitter, TikTok and Reddit are key platforms for the cozy bookish, but early data shows threads is becoming a key contender in this space
  • Cozy crime, cozy fantasy, and cozy mysteries are becoming full-blown 
sub-genres
  • Cozy reading nooks crossover into 
the cozy home trend

Movies, TV, & Music

Although a smaller volume, cosy music is largely focused around seasonal lofi beats playlist videos, which are usually 
hours long, so the engagement time is phenomenal. Cosy beats was popularised by the lofi girl on YouTube, but has extended into hundreds of copycat channels. These channels are inherently seasonal with thousands of cosy fall/cosy winter/cosy spring and cosy summer specific playlists.


There’s a whole TV/Home cosy crossover around ‘The Gilmore Girls Aesthetic’, almost entirely driven by Pinterest. It’s super seasonal, but for every season, it has generated over 200k posts in the last year. Not bad for a TV show that aired 24 years ago! It ties back to the cosy love and ongoing trend of all things nostalgic.


Movie nights and in particular family movie nights are also part of this theme, people don’t talk about specific shows or movies, more the idea of getting cosy and watching something. The content itself is almost irrelevant.

Spotlight on Cosy Gaming

What is cosy gaming and why should you care?

Gaming is now a bigger industry than music, TV, and film combined. The UKIE projects it to be worth over 200 billion dollars globally by 2025.

People think of gaming as a male-dominated Call of Duty/Helldivers space. Although this is true tot a certain exten, there’s a growing gaming genre that is the opposite of this intense, action-fuelled melee. The concept of cosy gaming isn’t new; these types of games have been around for a long while. 

Cosy gaming, or wholesome gaming, refers to video games that provide a relaxing, calming, and stress-free gaming experience, usually with simple gameplay mechanics, non-photo realistic visual styles, and a focus on activities like crafting, farming, exploring, or building. The trend gained popularity around the late 2000s and early 2010s with games like Minecraft and Stardew Valley, but it really kicked off again during the pandemic with Animal Crossing New Horizons. The vibe here is supremely low-stakes and peaceful.

These are the hashtag views on TikTok around some of the bigger cosy gaming hashtags.

It’s quite large.

Below you’ll see the global search data around cosy gaming over the last five years. It’s definitely trending up.

Key Findings

  • Demographically, cozy gamers are much more likely to be female than male.
  • Cosy gaming does not peak in Autumn/Fall but is instead remarkably consistent year round
  • According to the data we can access, cosy gamers are most likely younger millennials.
  • Cozy gamers are also into art, collecting, anime and cats
  • As the market becomes more saturated gamers are becoming bored with
  • formulaic games
  • Nintendo Switch is the unofficial home of cozy gaming but since the release of the Steam Deck many gamers are considering switching due to the wider variety
  • of games
  • Reddit is just about the gaming whereas TikTok and Pinterest heavily crossover into the whole cozy lifestyle and aesthetic.

Cozy gaming is accessible to all!

The demographic data available to us will always have a platform skew.

I found this Reddit thread in r/CozyGamers last week talking about how old gamers on this sub were.

The ages ranged from teens to people in their mid-70s. 

Cozy gaming is for non-traditional gamers.

Final thoughts

In 2024 everything can be cosy.

This mass of connections shows the crossover from #cozy to other hashtags on TikTok over the last 60 days.

It crosses over with gaming, friends, autumn, interior design, ASMR, cottagecore, Minecraft, booktok, nature, Hello Kitty, loungewear, productivity, gardening, romance, moods, TV shows, photography, goblincore, cooking, and many more. 

This is just one platform, 2 months worth of data, and outside of the traditional cosy season.

Cosy is here to stay and it’s happening year round.

If you’d like to learn more about anything I’ve shared here, or you have a project you’d like to collaborate on, please send me a message!

Who Are The UK Euphoria Social Fandom?

Kim · Mar 11, 2022 ·

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.

https://twitter.com/Holliescott19x/status/1495596793459003396

lexi single handedly humiliated the fuck out of nate and got him to break up with cassie. she is that bitch #euphoria pic.twitter.com/m8Jlax9z3j

— libra enabler🧣 (@omotitty) February 21, 2022

So they give Elliot a fricking gig half way through but don’t show the Mandy & Cassie fight, doesn’t explain the fact Rue still owes a human trafficker 10k, the disappearance of McKay or what was in fez’s letter to Lexie.
MAKE IT MAKE SENSE! 😭 #Euphoria pic.twitter.com/3iRG8f72u6

— Linzi-Louise (@louise_linzi) February 28, 2022

the two types of friend #Euphoria pic.twitter.com/c1RSJ0v2pB

— your mom is a FAT CUNT ✨ (@uglywh0re6969) February 28, 2022

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!

Marvel Studios’ Hawkeye: A Twitter Conversation Study

Kim · Jan 11, 2022 ·

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

Whoever started this #Hawkeye post credits scene rumour needs to go to jail

— Heavy Spoilers (@heavyspoilers) December 8, 2021

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!

How to really connect with your audience in the age of ‘Peak TV’

Kim · Jun 2, 2017 ·

Earlier this year, I gave a quick talk at the TV Connect conference about how you can use social media to get right to the heart of your viewer base, even in the age of peak TV.

Below is an embed of the deck and a shortened version of my speaker notes.

So first a bit of background. What is peak tv? Put simply; it’s just that there are too many shows.

According to Research, 455 original scripted programs aired on American television in 2016, that’s up from 210 shows in 2009. A massive increase. Now I realise we’re in the UK, but with global release dates becoming more common, access to Netflix and on-demand programming, alongside satellite and cable, we’re in a very similar situation. There’s ‘too much’ great stuff out there.

I don’t know how much you guys know about fandom, so I’ll explain a little.

Fandom has been around for a long time. It’s not new. Fun fact, loads of the fandom vernacular (shipping for example) actually originates from the first Star Trek series.

Fandom essentially means anything that fans create around the thing they love, and the fans themselves. E.g Comicon is all about fandom.

Tumblr, a slightly lesser know social/blogging network is the home to all things fandom.

The takeaway here for social TV is that the fandom itself LOVES the show we’re trying to market. They’re overwhelmingly positive about it.

So, how do you find out about what your fandom are into? (click for gif)

Always start with Tumblr

Fandometrics is a weekly updated part of Tumblr that ranks all the different fandoms on Tumblr by subject. It is an invaluable research tool for Social TV with any kind of millennial/Z fanbase.

My strategies always start with talking to the fandom. Identifying these guys is like finding the biggest built in advocates for your show. So I start with them and then the social influencer and bloggers start to pay attention, and from there you can reach the mainstream.

Back to Doctor who again. While I was writing the strategy for the Mission Dalek campaign, I felt it was really important to understand the implications of the different types of audience who were fans of shows on different platforms. For example, when looking at the best way to connect with Dr Who fans on Instagram I identified a huge community of girls who cosplay as the various female assistants. I decided to leverage this as a way to get the often overlooked younger female Whovians involved in our competition, by allowing them to enter with cosplay images.

The US broadcaster CW knows this better than anyone else. Social TV champions from the get-go, they figured out which shows had the biggest audiences on which platforms and prioritised content there way back in 2014. Reign was all about Pinterest due to the costumes; Supernatural has always ruled Tumblr and the then new ‘The Flash’ was fast becoming a YouTube sensation.

Understanding which of your fans are on which platforms and the content that resonates on that platform will help you more than anything else when it comes to engagement planning.

And so to my final, and most important point.

When social first started, way back a decade ago, building communities was the whole point of Twitter. Then marketing came and suddenly it was a place just to advertise. Community was out of the proverbial window.

Well, the one sure-fire secret to really engaging with your fans in the age of peak TV, is to hire a great community manager.

A community manager is like a social media manager ‘plus’ They are tasked not just with publishing updates and responding to enquiries, but actively being involved in, and growing the community that they’re looking after.

I was writing the social strategy for E4 a couple of years back, and to test my hypothesis I took on community management duties for one week.

During that time e4 were airing Supernatural but weren’t really aware of the huge fandom around it. I created a strategy to truly engage with the fans by doing things like:

  • Creating content that would resonate with them
  • Speaking in their language ‘shipping terms etc.’
  • Live tweeting key moments of the shows

This resulted in not just an outpouring of love for e4 from fans during the week, but also with metrics.

The week leading up to my community management, there had been a paid campaign running, I won’t disclose how much, but it was a not insignificant amount of money. This achieved 572k impressions.

The week I took over, organically, we achieved almost 750 thousand impressions.

Which just goes to show what a combination of a good social strategy and a good community manager who knows your content can do.

Social Media and Social TV are not the Same Thing!

Kim · Jun 23, 2015 ·

Okay, maybe that title was a little misleading, in that social media is definitely an intrinsic part of social tv as it provides the tools that make it possible.

What I’m really trying to do in this post is point out that the two things, although sounding the same, require very different approaches. 

Which is why I’ve come up with 4 principles for you to consider, when approaching a social TV project.

Social media for both brands and broadcasters, is an often awkward, slightly perplexing idea.

Yes, you need to be visible on it, yes you need to be creating some form of content as part of this deal, and yes you need to be listening and responding to your consumers. But this is where the similarities end, for one simple reason*

People are already fans of TV shows!

Nerd Rage gif from 30 Rock

They’re interested in the stories you have to tell, they’re interested in the secrets you can share, they’re interested in the exclusives you can dangle in front of them as your will decides.

With brands, people are largely interested in getting stuff for free and customer service, unless you’re lucky enough/smart enough to have built a really strong content offering, solidly over time then getting them to stay interested in your content in 2015, is pretty hard work.

So, it makes sense that you would go about developing your social media strategy for a broadcaster, quite differently than you would for a brand.

When it comes social TV, it really is all about the fandom.

Fandom is something that brands rarely have unless they’re very, very good with Tumblr (I’m looking at you Dennys)

The key to creating a good social TV strategy is understanding the fandom. Only then can you create the kind of content that fans will go crazy for.

This sounds obvious, but time and experience have taught me that it’s really not.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying you need to love the shows, but you need to understand the fandom.

In every social TV project that I’ve worked on, I’ve started with the fandom and worked my way outwards to the mainstream.

Starting with the mainstream is never going to work, because those guys aren’t going to be bothered about your show unless it’s popular right now.

Fandom is what makes the show popular, it’s what buys the shirts and the boxsets and creates the art and goes to Comicon and gets the people on Facebook interested in watching in the first place.

Not all platforms are created equal

Yes, this goes for regular social too, but (kings of social TV, The CW will tell you) it’s more pronounced with TV.  (Or as I like to put it, don’t try Superwholock on Facebook.)

Different types of people naturally gravitate towards certain platforms. Always, always look at your analytics and then use them to hone your hunches.

Different platforms require different content types and different timings. Are you looking to build buzz, drive to TX or drive to catch up? Each of these things will benefit from understanding the whens are wheres and whos.

Also, people are beginning to make noise about Snapchat being the future of social TV, so you might want to keep an eye on that.

Oh, and always check fandometrics.

Everyone loves a reaction gif.

Seriously.

If you want to know more about any of this/are looking for some help with social TV, then please drop me a line.

*Yes, I know there are exceptions to this rule, but they are just that, exceptions.

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