Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

Strategy

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.

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!

I Talked to Pulsar Platform About the Work That I Do

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Those of you who have read my previous posts know how highly I rate Pulsar Platform as the best way to do social listening. I talked to them earlier this year about the ways that I use their platform and how effective is has been in allowing me to craft strategies with brilliant results.

Click the image to head over to Pulsar and read the full piece.

Social Media for SMEs in the Age of Coronavirus

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With much of the world on lockdown for the foreseeable, social media has become more important to businesses as both a way of supporting their communities and helping to keep them afloat financially during these tumultuous times.

With this in mind, I wanted to offer five quick tips for ways that smaller and medium-sized businesses can use social media effectively over the next few months.

Don’t post if you don’t have anything to say

It’s tempting during this time to either keep to your regular social marketing content or to post more than usual given that many of us find ourselves with more free time on our hands.

Don’t.

People are scared and adapting to an unprecedented way of living, now is not the time to tell them about your new product launch (unless it’s actually useful for right now) and definitely not the time for any April Fools content!

I understand that everyone is trying to make a living, and I’m not saying halt all sales-based posts completely. I’m saying make sure that they are necessary and…

If you do have something to say, make sure it’s accurate and appropriate for now

In these changing times, we need to adapt our tone of voice.

This doesn’t mean every post must be sombre and joy-free (quite the opposite) but it does mean think carefully about how your posts will be received.

When you’re creating posts always try and think about how they can be helpful to the people reading them, even if you are directing them to a sales link.

I don’t recommend sharing news about the pandemic via business accounts at all, but if you are going to do this, please make sure that any third party content you share is accurate.

There is a lot of misinformation flying around to help combat this you should check any information before sharing. Infotagian is a new site that has been set up to fact check any news/claims about Covid-19.

Use this time to get to know your audience

Finding the time to write a proper social strategy without a dedicated team is hard to do, but if you find yourself with some downtime now is a great time to take the first steps towards this by running a social media audit and starting some audience analysis. If you have the time/budget, I recommend doing some social listening to understand customer issues and pain points during the pandemic.

There are many free tools available to do this, depending on which platforms you are using.

By gaining a better understanding of your audience you’ll be able to identify common interests, which in turn will allow you to…

Create content that is useful/Support your social media community

Social media is not just for marketing; it’s a really useful community-building tool – and community building is key to a good social media strategy.

Think about what you’ve learned about your audience.

  • Are they concentrated in one physical location?
    You could share content about how to get involved in local initiatives.
  • Are they interested in a particular product?
    If you are a maker of things, you could ask your followers to leave comments letting others know of their other favourite maker accounts to support.
  • Do many of them share a similar profession or field of work?
    Ask them to share challenges they are having in the current climate and if other followers can offer advice.

Share positive things!

The world is a scary place right now, there is a lot of news and not much of it seems good. People are being inundated.

If you’re doing something to help, or you know of someone else who is, let other people know!

Stories of positive action and hope are even more important during this period of isolation. (This works better if the news you’re sharing is local or specific to your audience, I’m not suggesting you turn your account into a ‘good news memes’ only feed).

As things change and a path forward becomes clearer I suspect we will all be adapting our social media strategies to make the best of the new normal we find ourselves living in.

I am currently writing a complete guide to Social Media for SMEs in the Age of Coronavirus. It will include:

  • more detailed information on running audits,
  • creating simple social strategies
  • using content pillars
  • tone of voice
  • using analytics to guide you
  • community management tips and tricks to ensure your posts are seen by the right people.

Please sign up below and I will email you when it is available (hopefully in the next two weeks)

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Until then, stay safe, stay home, and stay well.

The Same-ification of Social Media

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It’s been happening for years…

Little by little, the social networks all started to steal from one another and adopt similar functionality until all the platforms allowed you to share the same types of content. This just encouraged brands to share the same content across all the platforms (with slightly different pixel dimensions if they were really making an effort).

But it wasn’t just the platforms. The things users were posting became suspiciously similar too. I’m sure you all remember this article from a couple of years back about how similar Instagram posts were becoming.

And it’s not just influencers. Over the last year I’ve worked with a variety of alcohol brands and run social listening projects for all of them. I became really discouraged by the sheer amount of bottle shots on Instagram.

I understand that brands are proud of their bottle designs and labels and rightly so, they are an incredibly important part of the brand experience.

BUT! What if not all the content on the internet looked the same?

What if you took a chance and crafted a strong brand tone of voice and social identity that wasn’t just ‘honest and friendly’ and the same as what everyone else was doing.

As social media becomes ever more overpopulated with the same style of copy and posts from so many brands – it offers up a perfect opportunity for your brand to stand out.

Sure, all the beautifully curated shots are getting reasonable engagement, but are they delivering on actual objectives?

Consider MoonPie

MoonPie were included in almost every agency case study in 2017 for having such a strong brand personality and really generating the kinds of organic engagement people just weren’t seeing anymore. Fast forward 3 years to 2020 and they are still at it. Going from strength to strength:

The MoonPie example wasn’t just about generating engagement though, this was reflected in sales. Within the first year, they had increased sales by 17% just by using Twitter. They currently have over 320k Twitter followers and only post about once a fortnight. That is some good ROI!

Good social media strategy always starts with a strong brand strategy – but it’s only really great when brands are brave enough to do something a little bit different.

(This is where a good social listening project comes in! Being able to identify who your online audience is, where they live, their different interest clusters, how they behave on different platforms, etc. This ‘real people’ insight allows you to craft a social media strategy with real personality and content that will actually resonate with your target audience on the right platforms for you – get in touch if you want to talk about how I can help you achieve this)