Kim Townend Studio

Social Media Listening, Strategy, Trends, & Audience Insights

The Blog

What you’re getting when you hire me.

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I’ve worked in social media since 2006 and have been a social/digital strategist for the majority of my career.

Being a social strategist is very similar to being most other kinds of strategist, besides the requirement to stay across the updates, algorithms and ever-changing requirements of multiple social networks.

”You still have the same work to do in understanding client goals and the market’s general state and identifying the insights you can leverage to give you the best chance of success. Or, as Mark Pollard puts it,“Strategy is an informed opinion on how to win.”You still have the same work to do in understanding client goals and the market’s general state and identifying the insights you can leverage to give you the best chance of success. Or, as Mark Pollard puts it, “Strategy is an informed opinion on how to win.”

So, how am I different, and why should you care?

I’ve used social listening in some form for almost the entire span of my career. I believe that the better we understand our audience, the better the strategy we can create, the better the content/product/insights we can produce, ultimately leading to the best results we can achieve.

Usually, social listening pros and social strategists are two different professions. One will brief the other on the sort of insights that they’re looking for; the social listening person will generate the insights based on what they think the strategist wants and relay them back to the strategist, who will use them to create their strategy. This increases the chance of miscommunication and often means the most valuable insights stay hidden.

On top of this, social listening is usually only available to people who can afford advertising or creative agencies, as alongside the cost of the software and data, you’re also looking at the cost of two people’s time.

With me, you’re getting the whole department in one person.

As an experienced strategist, I’ll shape the search to deliver precisely what we need and pivot if the search shows us a different direction. But the real magic happens in that I can take the insights I’ve generated and create a strategy that takes all of them and the nuances that don’t make it into the deck into account. There’s no disconnect or miscommunication between the insights and strategy teams when they are the same person!

So you, the end client, are getting an incredibly well-researched piece of work that gives you tangible goals and KPIs to work to, that take into account not only all the things we’ve learned about our category and audience through social listening but also how many posts we need to put out, in what format, and how TikTok differs from Instagram, and if we need to be on LinkedIn as well.

In many situations, I’ll even be able to recommend a social media manager to take care of the day-to-day posting for you. I can work with you on an ongoing basis to ensure that you’re taking advantage of any platform shifts and updates, review our KPIs, and evolve our strategy if our learnings show that this is required.

So, if you want agency-quality work without the agency price tag, message me and let’s talk.

Winter Solstice on Social: An Overview.

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Last week, I ran some social listening in the run-up to Winter Solstice to understand if it was still something that people were talking about. Here are some super topline learnings from my analysis.

The key findings are presented as a video for ease of consumption.

Channel Breakdown of the social channels driving the social conversation around Winter Solstice

Generative trend platform NextAtlas is predicting that social media interest in the Winter Solstice will grow by another 8% over the coming year. The majority of interest around Winter Solstice is being driven by Instagram, a platform that we can’t track historic data for.

This indicates that the Winter Solstice conversation is actually even bigger than we thought.

Is this a social only trend or is it translating to search and shopping?

I’ve analysed the data across various platforms including Google, Bing, Amazon, Pinterest, LinkedIn and TikTok, and Winter Solstice is growing on all of them.

It’s useful to be able to contextualise what else people are searching for. One of the biggest associated upward trending topics was a novel set at Winter Solstice by Rosamund Pilcher, indicating that this date has significance outside of the pagan/wellness communities.

Great, how is this useful to me?

Well, alongside understanding the bigger cultural shift back to a more seasonal way of living that ties into climate change anxiety and a desire for slower living, there are also some clear and tangible benefits to using this data.

  • There’s definitely consumer appetite for Solstice and the return of the light, but there are very few products associated with this day, this represents a big gap in the market for wellness brands whose audiences this would resonate with.
  • Expect to see more people organising events around Solstice/Equinoxes over the coming years. Again, this goes hand in hand with the current resurgence of interest in Folklore in the UK.
  • There are multiple opportunities for farmers/food producers/small batch brands to create special seasonal solstice recipes/dishes/types of produce.

Social listening doesn’t have to just inform what Gen Z are doing on TikTok, the data can have far-reaching uses that can help brands, businesses and communities of any size.

Social Media Witches

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Witches are real, and they’re on TikTok

NOTE: This post was originally published on the Pulsar Platform blog in May 2022 but it doesn’t exist there anymore, and it is one of my favourite social listening analysis pieces. I was responsible for all the research that went into the piece, but it was actually written by Alex Bryson and Dahye Lee.

Once upon a time, calling yourself a witch would see you cast out of society, or worse. Today, describing yourself as such places you within a cultural movement whose influence on media, lifestyle and now corporate storytelling keeps on growing.  

Witches have long featured in entertainment, with a procession of Glindas, Sabrinas and Hermiones helping rehabilitate their reputation within the mainstream. Against this ever-growing presence within both traditional and modern media spaces, however, we’ve also seen the continued growth of witchy, wiccan or pagan practices and aesthetics as a lifestyle choice – and a corresponding decline in the use of witch as a political or public slur.

Why has this happened? Certainly it’s helped that Hilary Clinton, the popular target of many ‘witch’ slights, has exited the political stage. But we’ve since seen the slur applied to a range of different political subjects, from the rise of Marine Le Pen, to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe vs Wade.

And so, while the term’s use in the political theatre has dipped, the shift in emphasis is as much due to the explosion of interest in witches elsewhere. Because not only have practitioners remained a constant within written fiction, and continued to feature more and more within streaming and gaming, witches have also, in 2022, been mentioned well over double as many times in conjunction with lifestyle words and phrases as they were in early 2018. 

This trend is typified by #witchtok, which has ushered in a new breed of ‘baby witch’.

As with many trends that begin on TikTok, the trend has quickly cycled from niche interest to mainstream concern to the kind of in-joke and vocabulary intrinsic to the platform. It’s also attracted a fair degree of opprobrium, with experienced practitioners often resistant to a trend that can sometimes prioritize the aesthetic over the spiritual, or else run roughshod over existing practice. 

So how do these values and behaviours differ within the wider witch subculture? Who are the audiences engaging with the topic? And what do we mean when we say ‘witch’? 

By using Pulsar TRAC to analyze over 800k posts made across Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest, Tiktok, blogs, forums and more, all posted within the USA, UK and Canada between February and May 2022, we look to unearth insights that will answer these questions.

First of all, what is it that witches actually do? 

We see the trend incorporate and intersect with astrology and herbal medicine: 

And, of course, there’s no shortage of spells. As follows from witch tradition, these incorporate a number of physical objects, ranging from ingredients like bay leaves to magic-specific equipment such as spell jars.

The behavior, aesthetic and experience level of these witches differs from community to community. 

So Green Witches, for instance, base their practice in natural elements like plants, animals and stones. Kitchen witches, on the other hand, practice magic through cooking, and the properties of individual ingredients. These terms aren’t exclusive either. An urban witch can both live in the city and also practice the unethical practices of a black witch. 

By mapping the relative experience of these witches and whether the language around them leans more towards the spiritual or the aesthetic, it’s clear that new adopters, or ‘baby’ witches, have become more prominent within the space.

There’s another factor at hand, though, which is that young witches are more likely to classify themselves in this way. Older witches are more polymorphic in their custom, likely to engage in many of the customs featured above, but less likely to define themselves as belonging to one particular subset.

If you want to talk to this subculture, it’s important to understand that they will want to be addressed and understood in very different ways. 

So who is it who compiles this subculture in the first place?

When we isolate the communities engaging in the conversation on socials, we still see a very pronounced affinity for books, movies and podcasts. It would appear that witchcraft as a lifestyle trend is not evolving parallel to the witches within media conversation, but rather incorporating many of the same members. 

Print & Podcast pagans share a common affinity for publications, publishing houses and podcast channels that specifically explore witchcraft in relation to personal growth, such as the WIld Hunt or Llewellyn.

Tweets by LlewellynBooks

Handmade Witchcraft Queens, on the other hand, primarily follow accounts that create and sell household or fashion items, from crochet to glassware to jewelry. 

As such, the wider community appears to largely cohere around these two primary activities: media consumption and small scale goods creation and consumption. If there’s a singular point of difference between these two behaviors, however, it’s that the subculture are at least used to external corporate bodies creating the media they consume (for all that it invariably creates a certain amount of blowback). 

Conversely, the importance and intransience of physical objects within the culture’s belief structures mean independent retailers remain dominant, and are unlikely to be usurped – something we’ll explore in more detail shortly.

Of course, being a witch is not simply a matter of engaging with wiccan practices or dressing in a certain way. There is also a significant overlap between elements of the subculture and social causes.

To some extent this takes the form of as people self-identifying as witches look to drive change using a culture distinct from the patriarchal norm. And here, it’s important to distinguish the ‘religious’ aspect as something distinctly political for being female-led and formed.

At the same time, however, we also see a lot of attention directed towards the self, with Witchtok in particular featuring a number of affirming and even anxiety-tackling spells: 

@thewitchofroselight

I forgot to mention that you can also dress your candle with lavender essential oil 💜 Supplies, ingredients, + books are now up on my st0refront, 🖇️ in b!o 🫶🏻🫶🏻🫶🏻 #witchesoftiktok #witchcraft #witchtiktok #witchcraft101 #witchytips #antianxietyspell #candlespell #candlespellwork #spellwork #candlemagic #candlemagick #beginnerspells #easycandlespell #beginnerwitch

♬ Amas Veritas – Alan Silvestri

It goes without saying that these social aspects are engaged in very different ways.  And, using Pulsar’s Communities integration we can see how these audience segments display different attitudes. 

LGBTQ activism, for instance, is a powerful motivating factor for Witchy Readers and Writers, whereas the Handmade Witchcraft Queens spread their own advocacy more evenly between feminism, supporting the culture’s religious aspects, and LGBTQ rights.

So, witches are a subculture entirely fixed on the political and the unearthly, right? Not quite. 

We’ve already seen pronounced behaviours around buying and selling and, if  #witchtok has emphasized anything, it’s the tension between different forms of consumerism within the space.

Once, spiritual shops were the only way of accessing the equipment and supplies one needed to be a witch. Online platforms subsequently made all sorts of horizontal economies possible within the space – something that can be evidenced by how many accounts within the space either describe themselves as creators, or else cluster around craft as a topic.

In addition to providing links to, and information about, particular items like Spell Jars and Terrariums, there’s also a vibrant thread of conversation that focuses on budget witch tips. This thread connects many of the ‘baby’ witches new to the scene with some of its more established faces – after all, witches aren’t immune to wanting to save money.

The witch subculture is not a closed shop either, with numerous overlapping trends sharing common features such as astronomy, nature, spells and female empowerment – as well as that same sense of horizontal, community-driven economy.

Social Listening for SMEs

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I firmly believe that the better the insights available, the better the strategy and results. Social listening has only been available to bigger brands with large marketing departments for too long. I’m trying to change that!

Why social listening is important for SMEs.

The more brands with access to audience insights and social data, the better the content becomes for everyone involved. Brands get improved results and stop relying on awareness days and irrelevant trends, and consumers get helpful and entertaining content that adds value.

This is especially the case for SMEs who are often dealing with more limited budgets. Creating organic content that resonates with your customers is often the only option you have. Social listening helps put you ahead of the game by understanding your audience, and the social opportunity much better.

Who is using social listening?

Right now, it’s only really larger corporations with marketing departments and teams of analysts who are using social listening insights to inform their social strategies and beyond. This is partly due to the prohibitive cost of accessing this data, and also the cost of running a team who can analyse and provide insights from the data.

To combat this lack of democracy within social intelligence, I craft social intelligence reports at a price that even smaller brands can afford. You’re getting agency results without the agency price tag!

I’ll help you discover

  • Who your social audience is
  • Their demographics
  • Their interests
  • Their behaviours
  • The platforms they favour
  • What drives them to purchase
  • The accounts that influence them

and loads more valuable insights to help you cut through the noise and actually connect with your audience.

The audience segements of 185k social users who identify as cosy gamers. These are broken down into interest-based clusters, to help us better understand who they are and how/where to connect with them,
The audience segementation of 185k social users who identify as cosy gamers. These are broken down into interest-based clusters, to help us better understand who they are and how/where to connect with them,

If you’re a smaller business or just starting up, book a call with me/drop me an email and we’ll talk about how I can help.


Good data should be available to more people. Good data makes the internet a better place!

Pumpkin Spice Season 2023: A Social Analysis

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Throughout the end of Summer and Autumn, I created a search around “Pumpkin Spice’ across social media to help understand if we had passed peak pumpkin spice or if the Autumn beverage trend was still on the up.

Using the social listening tool YouScan, I analysed 950k posts across Twitter, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube and Reddit. These are the results.

Why did I decide to do this? Because 2023 is the 20th anniversary of Starbucks launching the Pumpkin Spice Latte. I wanted to understand if this behemoth of a seasonal trend was still growing with each passing year or if its time was done.

Is Pumpkin Spice Even Still a Thing?

Due to social listening constraints, the only platform that we can easily access full historical data for is Twitter/X. I’ve pulled mentions of pumpkin spice from January 2020 until now and as you can see, there’s been a strong upward trajectory. This year, we’ve seen slightly fewer tweets, but it could be argued this has more to do with the mass exodus from Twitter than a lack of pumpkin spice love.

The interest in pumpkin spice peaks each year around the same time; this is usually around the end of August on the first day that the Fall menu is available at Starbucks.

When did people start talking about it this year?

Looking at the social data across all tracked platforms from this year specifically, you’ll see it was late August when the conversation really got started, with two prominent peaks in this month, one for Dunkin’s launch on August 16th and one for Starbucks on August 24th. After the initial excitement died down, the conversation remained pretty consistent throughout September, peaked again on October 1st and began a steady decline from there; by the time we hit early November, the chatter had almost dried up (due in no small part to the release of the Starbucks/Dunkin holiday menus).

The vast majority of this conversation was driven by America. When I dived a little deeper into the UK-specific data (primarily from X) I found that our conversational peak was much later (late October) and driven primarily by a pumpkin spice-themed B&M competition.

Channel Mentions vs Engagement

Looking at the data from the end of August this year until now, we can see that Twitter/X is still the clear leader when it comes to posting your pumpkin spice-related content, with 469k posts being made on the platform in the last three months.

However, when we look at where the engagement is happening, it’s a wildly different story. Although TikTok only accounted for around 150k original posts, it delivered over 220 MILLION engagements. Twitter/X on the other hand managed just under 4 million impressions on three times the number of original posts.

YouTube was also a channel people took to when sharing their Pumpkin Spice content, and here, the engagements were more in line with what we would expect.

You’ll note that there’s no Instagram data, and this is due to Meta’s API confines that make geo-specific searches impossible.

What are People talking about?

Although #pumpkinspice was the most used hashtag, the OG ‘Pumpkin Spice Latte’ still dominates the online conversation around the season.

What were some of the biggest trends this year?

Using YouScan, I was able to easily identify what some of the top trends in this year’s pumpkin spice- themed conversation were.

The video ‘White Women ordering Pumpkin Spice Coffee’ was the most talked about trend of the season, primarily due to its incendiary nature. Although it was extremely popular and many people found it funny, it was also called racist and drove a wider conversation around double standards.

Another notable talking point was around Ed Sheeran working a shift in Starbucks to promote his new record “Autumn Variations”.

Given his superstar status, this drove a lot of conversation.

Although some users were into this, many posts were around millionaire celebrities doing working-class cosplay to sell more records.

https://twitter.com/SimkayeOfficial/status/1709294432955363441

One of the biggest user-generated trends of the season was ‘Summer is Dead, Pumpkin Spice Forever’, a celebration/call to arms for the (huge) online community who anxiously await the month of October and the official beginning of Fall.

There is a massive crossover between this community and the Halloween community. Almost 10% of the mentions in this whole search mentioned Halloween by name.

Interestingly, although this community is voracious about their love of all things Autumn, relatively few brands have capitalised on this, and those that have are primarily in the food and drink space.

Is it still basic to drink PSL?

@withlottie

They really think they did something with that one but they didn’t !!!! #basic

♬ original sound – lottie

Out of the 950k posts that we analysed, only 23k of them mentioned ‘basic’ in any capacity, and more surprising still, there was much less negativity associated with the term. Most posts were either neutral or celebrated the creators ‘basic’ status.

However, there are still hundreds of posts from men talking about basic white girls in conjunction with Pumpkin Spice, so anti-feminist trolling is still very much a thing.

Who is the Audience?

Although it’s commonly thought that it’s just women who are the driving force behind Pumpkin season, you’ll see that posts from men are almost as common. The biggest contributor by far though is ‘other’ which usually indicates posts from creators and from brands. Pumpkin Spice Season is such a cultural moment at this stage, that the conversation is being driven by those who want to benefit from the trend.

That being said, the audience that we are able to track the ages of, are still largely millennial females.

Pumpkin Spice isn’t something Gen X or Gen Z seem particularly bothered about.

As we would expect the United States dominates the conversation, but if you look at this map of mentions, you’ll see that very few regions of the world remain untouched by pumpkin spice (including those south of the equator who aren’t even in the same season).

Different Channels, Different Conversations

TikTok Conversation

When we look at the most used keywords, tags, and terms on TikTok (home of engagement) versus Twitter (home of less engagement and more bad brand content) we can see immediately that on TikTok pumpkin spice is part of the overall Autumn/Fall vibe. While yes, there are many people talking about pumpkin spice latte, there are more people talking about #pumpkinseason is general.

On Twitter however, the conversation is dominated by the pumpkin spice latte, and littered with brand mentions, competitions, and sponsored posts.

Twitter Conversation

This isn’t to say that there isn’t Starbucks-related content on TikTok, there is, loads of it. It just comes primarily from users and feels like it lives on the platform; see the TikToks below:

@thehanniediaries

all my PSL girlies RUN 🎃🍸 #fyp #starbucksreserve #starbucks #pumpkinspicelatte #pumpkinspiceseason #autumnaesthetic

♬ love actually is all around – Juliet
@snackolator

Which items are you grabbing from the Fall @Starbucks menu? There are so many pumpkin spice options but I’m loving the apple crisp drinks… and the Starbucks Reserve menu is crazy fancy! #starbuckscoffee #Starbucks #pumpkinspice #starbucksdrinks #starbuckspumpkinspice #pumpkinspicelatte #psl #falldrinks #pumpkinspiceseason #starbucksdrink

♬ Chill in a good mood, calm and fun(1263486) – zukisuzuki

Do Starbucks still own Pumpkin Spice Season?

It seems the answer to this is a resounding yes!

Although brand mentions are typically low in social conversation, Starbucks still accounted for a whopping 12% of the overall conversation. This is just brand text mentions, and doesn’t count for image analysis. So yes. Starbucks created, supported, and still own Pumpkin Spice Season.

Pumpkin Spice brand share of voice

How does This Social Phenomenon Translate to Search?

So now we understand what’s happening on social, but how does it translate to search?

Using Exploding Topics I’ve looked at some of the key search topics associated with pumpkin spice over the last five years.

At this stage it’s worth bearing in mind that this data is from Google, and those under 30 are increasingly using social for search, so this data is probably more representative of an older audience and may be responsible for the downturn in recent search results.

Starbucks Pumpkin Spice Latte is still the most searched-for term by far, and although the number of searches peaked in 2019, the trend has re-emerged every year since, as soon as the first hint of Fall is in the air, and it’s been holding pretty steady since.

Another similarly spiky trend is Pumpkin Spice Candles, which have experienced almost 5000% search growth in the last five years. This also appears to be on the decline now, but we can’t say for sure that it’s not just a reflection of the shift towards social search that we’re seeing. (we saw 45k posts around pumpkin spice recipes of DIYs within our search, and I didn’t include Pinterest, where much of this content lives, so the amount is likely much higher.)

Healthier Pumpkin Spice?

Although most of the conversation is still around sugar and dairy-filled treats, we’re starting to see more established healthier brands capitalise on the season, with pumpkin spice oat milk and creamer containing actual pumpkin. This suggests that either pumpkin spice is moving away from its ‘basic’ perception. Or there’s an overlap between ‘basic’ and healthier living.

Pumpkin Spice Barista Oat Milk by Califia Farms

How is this data useful?

Eventually! the TL: DR

There are hundreds of applications for social listening data from a search like this. Here I’ve outlined four use cases that I use frequently in client work.

1: Understanding who your audience is

I will die on this hill. Understanding who your audience is is the key to all good brand work. It’s imperative for social and content strategy, It aids your R&D, it can be applied to multiple different business areas. This is the first and biggest reason to run any social research. The more brands do this, the more resonant the content they can create is, which leads to happier consumers and happier brands.

2: What is your whitespace?

Thinking about launching a new product, but want to know which areas are up and coming, which are overcrowded, and what your positioning might be?

Using a combination of social and search data, you’ll be able to get a much deeper understanding of what your next move should be. Don’t rely on generic trend reports from last year, do your own up-to-the-minute research, and you won’t be sorry!

3: Timings & context

You’ve got your product ready to go, but how do you ensure you start talking about it at the right time to garner maximum attention? You don’t want to go too early, but you also don’t want to get lost in the noise, and you definitely don’t want to be too late.

Use social listening to understand the exact moment that’s right to launch on social. (And to understand the shape of the conversation this year, to adapt your key talking points to up-and-coming trends, and ensure you and your brand feel ‘of-the-moment’). You can also use the geo-specific data to plan different territory release dates, as we saw with the UK conversation peaks trailing the US.

4: Understanding wider cultural shifts

Up until now we’ve talked mostly about the use cases for social listening as primarily quite focused, but another brilliant use of social listening data on the longer term is to begin to get a grasp on what’s happening in culture at large. These shifts often begin on social (or at least this is the first trackable manifestation of them). Social can also help us understand what’s driving these changes, and the context soical allows means we can apply this data to longer term future planning.

I used data from YouScan, Exploding Topics Pro, and Pulsar Platform to create this post. As ever, if you’d like to talk to me about how I can help you with social analysis or strategy, please Get In Touch.