The Blog

BookTok UK: Trends and insights for brands & creators

Kim · Jul 29, 2023 ·

You’re probably no stranger to the BookTok phenomenon, a community of voracious readers on TikTok credited with reinvigorating the publishing industry and changing bookshop displays globally.

Instead of analysing BookTok as a general trend, we will focus on a snapshot of what’s happening on BookTok in the UK. Who is talking about what, why this is important, and how this kind of data can be leveraged to help brands / publicists / creators connect with their audience on this platform (and how YouScan can help us understand all of this).

Where are people posting about BookTok?

This might seem like a no-brainer, but we often see TikTok trends moving to dominate on other platforms (TikTokMadeMeBuyIt, for example).

In this search, 97% of the #BookTok mentions took place on TikTok, with Twitter, YouTube and Pinterest only accounting for a combined 1.5k mentions. BookTok is staying firmly on its channel of origin.

Who Posts About BookTok?

The majority of UK BookTok are female. Still, it was interesting that although TikTok is primarily considered a Gen Z platform, the primarily younger millennial 25-34 age bracket dominates this trend (age ranges according to the Pew Research Center data).

There weren’t any other commonalities when we looked at the interests of BookTokers aside from books and reading. However, there are also less popular yet still significant interests, such as parenting, poetry, art, fashion, travel, etc. This indicates that BookTok brings together a diverse group of people with distinct passions and hobbies.

YouScan allows us to analyse the occupations of any audience, and looking at BookTok, we can see that it’s the writers themselves who are the most common contributors, along with a host of other creative pursuits. This information helps us understand more about the audience we want to connect with outside of the content they’re posting. The better we know our audience, the better the strategy that we can write/the content we will create.

What’s Trending Up?

One of my favourite features of YouScan is the ‘trending words’ function. This allows us to identify what is trending up and down in any given search. It’s invaluable if you want to stay on top of changes by the week to ensure your content has the best possible chance of reach and engagement.

Next, let’s explore the concept of the Physical TBR (To Be Read) Pile, a stack of books you’ve got but have yet to read. It’s like a visual reminder of all the books you plan to dig into when you find the time. Physical TBR Pile is currently trending up in the UK (by almost 790% month on month).

Using the new (and amazing) Insights Copilot – the first social media listening assistant powered by ChatGPT, I could understand trends, the key themes, associated hashtags and even the titles of the books most often talked about in the posts. Some key findings included:

Many users on BookTok have large physical TBR piles that they are trying to tackle, some with over 100 books.
Users have different strategies for tackling their physical TBR, such as only allowing themselves to buy a new book after reading a certain number of books they currently own or using a TBR jar to select books to read randomly.
The most mentioned titles with physical TBR are Song of Achilles, Romance books, Fantasy books, Sherlock Holmes, Wild Scottish Knight, Miss Marple, Anne of the Island, Serpent and Dove, Jane Eyre, and In Deeper Waters.
Multiple posts mention the struggle of balancing adding new books to their collection with tackling their physical TBR.

he insights provided by Copilot were super comprehensive and saved me a tonne of analysis time.

Which Genres Are Trending?

Over the last month in the UK, I tracked 5 498 mentions of romance (up 175% month on month) and a further 1 860 mentions of the romance sub-genre ‘dark romance’. These were the only two genre mentions trending upwards.

People don’t really use genre tags much in the UK. It’s more about the specific titles or the broader #BookTok tag.

A Deeper Dive Into Romance

Using Visual Insights, we immediately learned that the most common things to find in a BookTok #romance post are a woman with long brown hair and a book or bookcase. Women with blonde hair are almost 50% less likely to feature in these romance-themed posts.

Interestingly, it’s this genre where Gen Z females are the dominant audience. There were no instances of anyone over 35 using this tag in the UK last month.

When we look at the dark romance sub-genre (often accompanied by the #spicyromance tag), posts featuring women with black hair tend to receive, on average, 9 times more engagement compared to their blond counterparts.

The dark romance genre, in particular, was rife with authors sharing chapters of their work that linked to Amazon shop pages in the style of Wattpad.

Any Other Findings?

As with all of social media in 2023, BookTok is now contending with large amounts of authors trying to sell their books or create enough buzz to get a Netflix deal and trying to enlist the community to do so. Identifying hashtags that are being used for this kind of bookspam will allow you to create better boolean searches that return only the most relevant data.

Although we’re seeing signs of a trend back to images over video elsewhere on TikTok, it’s a video that still rules BookTok. There were around 60K videos posted in our search to just under 5K images.

Within the nano and micro-influencer categories, there were more common interest themes than the general tag, and one of these was cosplay, suggesting that BookTok has some definitive fandom behaviours.

How Can These Insights Help You

It’s great that we’ve uncovered all this information, but how can we put it into action and make it work for us?

Identifying micro-influencers

For example, @xcosy.readsx has only 11.9K followers (a tiny amount by influencer standards), but her posts generated almost 175K engagements during May. Working with micro-influencers on a platform where engagements are much less tied to follower count makes even more sense. With short-form videos, it’s all about the views, not the owned audience. YouScan now segments the influencers automatically by nano/micro/macro, which takes a lot of the leg work out of deciding who is the best fit for your project.

Understanding what trends over time

Running a longer-term analysis will allow you to identify seasonal shifts and trends peaking and slowing. This information is invaluable if you’re trying to decide the best time to launch a new book in a particular genre.

Making Better Creative

Brunettes feature in more BookToks, and posts with black hair have a much higher engagement rate within the dark romance BookTok community. We can use these touchpoints when considering the type of posts we want to create.

Better paid targeting

We now know that Gen Z is much more interested in romance than millennial BookTokers; this data can easily be applied to your paid campaigns on the platform.

Winning Pitches

It’s no secret that most agencies aren’t doing loads of social listening before pitches, and many still don’t run audience-first campaigns. Creating pitch decks that put the audience at the heart of the project and show off how much you know about the space is guaranteed to impress.

This post first appeared on the YouScan blog

Ten Principles for Regenerative Social Marketing

Kim · May 7, 2023 ·

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kim · Mar 2, 2023 ·

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

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

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

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

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

1. Better Desk Research

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

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

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

2. Better Audience Segmentation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

3. Better Boolean Strings

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

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

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

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

Limitations

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

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

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

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

So…?

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

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

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

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

Kim · Oct 3, 2022 ·

In 2022, I wrote this piece for PulsarPlatform, you can see the original here, or read below.

Crafting a social strategy without undertaking social listening first can quickly thrust you into the same predicament as Wile. E. Coyote – legs cycling madly over a yawning chasm, wondering whether a little more planning, a little more insight, could’ve been invaluable.

For all that, there’s a lot of competing noise in the marketing, advertising and communications spaces over what exactly we mean by social listening, how it differs from social insights or strategy — and how audiences come into this.

Here’s what we know.

1. Navigating the lingo… and the logic

Social listening is using a tool such as Pulsar TRAC to understand what the wider world is saying about any given particular topic, trend or brand, across platforms as disparate as Twitter, Reddit, Pinterest or TikTok.

Using the analytics options available, you can draw social insights from this data – revealed behaviors, trends or pieces of information that can give you a competitive advantage when piecing together a social strategy.

This can range from understanding how different people talk about the same topic differently, or comparing how different platforms enable very different types of conversation, all the way to leveraging AI-enabled discovery around popular photo types.

These can then underpin any social strategy.

What tone and social tactics should I adopt?
What conversations should we look to take part in as a brand or institution?
How your brand should engage with events, based on the communities in your audience

2. How well do you really know your social audience?

How much do you really know about the people who follow you on social?

You might know their age range or what city they call home. You probably have an idea of which of your content is the most popular, but beyond that?

Using third-party data or analysing your social followers, you can understand the content and the influencers they’re engaging with, what they’re saying, and other social platforms they are likely to use

This will give you a better basis for creating content that actually resonates with them.

(The audience for Hellofresh shows huge overlap with the audience for the My Favorite Murder podcast, in terms of common interest, shared behaviors and self-description – study here)

3. Think beyond your current customers

Once you’ve got a clear idea about your current audience, it’s time to start thinking about other audiences that might be interested in your wares. This can be as narrow as brand competitor audiences or as broad as topics of interest identified during owned audience analysis. Whichever you choose, using social data to cluster your potential audiences into groups that you can base your social strategy on will give you the best chance of success.

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

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

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

5. Interests, not demographics!

Marketers love to target by demographics, they’re easy to understand, and industry folks are familiar with who an ABC1 is. But how useful are they when it comes to crafting an effective comms strategy? In 2022 it feels archaic to try to define people by what they earn and not what they’re into.

Using social listening to understand your audience’s interests and focusing on these groupings instead allows for a more cohesive social output.

(Visualizing the different hobbies and jobs the communities talking about MacBooks online use their personal laptops for – study here)

6. Your content pillars should sit at the intersection between brand and audience interests

We can learn and understand so much about our potential audience with social listening.

What do they talk about? Who do they follow? Which shows do they watch?

Social listening can turn this data into insights, and using these insights to create a strategy that works for your brand and your customers is a no brainer.

You want to create content that gets your brand comms to the right audience, and knowing what that audience likes will allow you to do this in the most effective way.

Netflix, for instance, know that their core audience are also engaging with astrology memes:

welcome to Sagittarius SZN

(📺: Survivor) pic.twitter.com/rfpY8eqwCK
— Netflix (@netflix) November 24, 2020

7. Pain points are your friends

The reports your agency provides you monthly will always tend to focus on what people like about your brand, but running a social listening project can also help you identify what people don’t like about your brand and other potential areas of friction. This can assist you in multiple work streams (hello FAQs), especially when crafting a social strategy. Knowing the key detractors or what issues may arise before you create content gives you a serious advantage when planning your output.

Different Brands attract different complaints

8. Social calendar planning is a two-way street

Oftentimes social marketing calendars are totally led by brand activity. But they will work better if you take what your audience is doing into account. Identifying the natural peaks and troughs in the conversation around the topics you’re interested in will allow you to plan with the natural ebb and flow of the conversation. Identifying events that your audience is interested in (hint, they are probably not awareness days) allows you to contextualise your content in a way most won’t bother to do.

9. Different platforms have different audiences and different expectations

Many businesses still plan for just one target audience across all social platforms, when in truth, people use different social in different ways. It’s likely that even if someone is following your brand on TikTok and on Twitter, they have different expectations of each.

You can really supercharge your social by understanding which audiences live on which platforms and creating a strategy that takes this and the algorithms into account.

Social Strategist (and Pulsar power-user) Kim Townend has amassed 15 years’ experience in managing social departments, delivering masterclasses, and writing strategy for leading brands and agencies. Here, she shares 8 tips for using social listening tools and audience insights to underpin smarter, data-backed strategy.