Kim Townend

Social Media Listening & Strategy

fandom

BookTok UK: Trends and insights for brands & creators

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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.

Visual Insights

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?

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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.

  1. 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

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 and Social TV are not the Same Thing!

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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.