OPPORTUNITY IN DISRUPTION

Understanding the Potential of Social Media Marketing and the Impact of Digital Communities for Consumer Publishing

Abstract:

This article discusses the development, adoption and continual reinvention of increasingly important digital tools and processes in consumer publishing. It applies particular focus to social media marketing as the usage, and influence, of social media platforms continues to grow. Through a brief examination of the historical context of book marketing, and by considering the impact of emergent digital communities and market ecosystems, the article provides insight into the significance of digital environments for consumer brands, including publishers, to effectively communicate and connect with their consumers, build customer loyalty and, ultimately, generate sales and maintain profitability. A key critical literature review from Nolan and Dane is used to gain an industry specific understanding of publisher social media activity. Additionally, marketing reports and consumer surveys, such as Sprout Social’s perceptive ‘Creating Connections: What Consumers Want from Brands in a Divided Society’ (2018) and HubSpot’s ‘Marketing Strategy Survey’ (2022), are used to explain the contemporary consumer’s expectations of digital brands and to interpret the ways publishers can use this to inform the development of their digital marketing strategy, most crucially as it relates to social media marketing. From here, the article discusses the ways in which the industry is currently using social media and how these platforms may continue to transform book marketing processes.

Keywords:

Book Marketing, Social Media Marketing, Technological Disruption, Digital Consumer Expectations, Influencer Marketing, Digital Marketing, Algorithm-Driven Marketing, Data-Driven Marketing, BookTwitter, Bookstagram, BookTok, Book-blogger, Publishing Trends

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Introduction

From the original technological disruption of the Gutenberg Press, the publishing industry has proven itself capable of successfully adapting and evolving with the advances of society’s continual cycle of technological transformation. Undeniably though, it has also shown a pattern of apprehension and initial resistance towards the implementation of those changes. The media sector’s universal panic over the so-called ‘death of print’, which was provoked by the disruption of traditional media formats by advancing digital technology during the late 2000s, is perhaps the most dramatic and certainly the most cited example of this struggle. Yet, the publishing industry is still hesitant to embrace the potential

opportunities of an everchanging digital environment, where the timely adoption of digital technologies and tools is becoming necessary to compete in the contemporary consumer market. The current iteration of this technological disruption, and the chosen focus of this article, relates to understanding how consumer publishers might more effectively utilise social media (SM) to market their books and to build consumer relationships.

The Development of Marketing Departments in Publishing

As implied in Baverstock’s seminal How to Market Books (2015), book marketing as we understand it today is itself a product of technological advance. Fuelled predominantly by the huge impact of developing technology during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the industry experienced an unprecedented growth in the market for books (Feather, 2006). Traditionally, publishing had operated distinctively, ‘separated from the rest of the business world’, but the dissolution of the 1962-95 Net Book Agreement pulled the industry back into a competitive retail market (Baverstock, p. 348, 2019). With the growth of the consumer market and the new need to offer competitive prices to maintain existing business-2-business (B2B) retail relationships, came the additional pressure to contend with new media formats for consumer leisure time, and critically, money. Arguably, it was this competition and the new availability of informative sales data which stimulated the official introduction of rigorous, commercial product advertisement, and catalysed the establishment of dedicated marketing departments in publishing houses (Ibid, 2019).

With the emergence of these organised marketing departments, came the implementation of standardised, but still developing, data-driven marketing processes. In Baverstock’s more recent reflection, she describes how publishing has kept ‘an industry-specific approach to marketing [while remaining] porous to ideas from other disciplines’ (Ibid, p. 346, 2019). Still distinctive from other consumer products, the process of book marketing has been broadly defined as:

a form of representation and interpretation, situated in the spaces between the author and the reader—but which authors and readers also take part in—and surrounding the production, dissemination and reception of texts.

– Squires (p. 3, 2007)

As our latest age of digital transformation has progressed, the market’s adoption of multiple ‘mediums, formats, and outlets’, has meant that publishers have had to rapidly adapt their processes and marketing

strategies to meet the evolving expectations of their consumers across digital environments (Hughes, 2020). Of particular note in this regard, has been the continual creation of new SM platforms and the growth of communities-around-content which these sites have facilitated.

The Rise of Social Media and Social Media Marketing

An integral development of the digital revolution was the introduction, and the subsequent cycle of constant updates and improvements, of smartphone technology and personal digital devices. Since the late 2000s, we have seen the increasing growth in popularity of social networking sites (SNS) and SM apps aid the establishment of a globally connected digital community. Marketers across all industries understood the enormous potential for advertising within these communities, and now most consumer brands and retail companies, including publishers, have a presence on the major SM platforms. From 2010, Facebook has generally been the most popular, the most populous and the most preferred platform for marketing activity but, as Gould (2015) argues, the platform has since become ‘a one-way channel of information’ low on community interaction. It seems that newer platforms, notably Instagram and TikTok, are the most significant for book social media marketing (SMM), particularly in the consumer sector (Statista, 2021). Arguably, it is the organic formulation of highly active communities-around-content on these platforms, and their motivation to engage with the industry as well as with each other, which makes them a more perceptive audience for marketing. Just as the ‘BookTwitter’, ‘BookTube’ and ‘Bookstagram’ communities grew on their respective platforms, ‘BookTok’ has quickly developed on the short-form video platform, TikTok. With an incredible 1-billion active users and 40-billion videos under the BookTok hashtag, the platform represents a new zeitgeist, and a new opportunity, for book marketing (Iqbal, 2022).

Evolving Consumer Behaviours and Expectations in the Digital Age

However, the increasing size and influence of these communities also reflects the contemporary consumer’s desire to be drawn ‘directly into the field of literary production as authors, tastemakers and direct customers’ (Nolan and Dane, 2018). Many international retailers and publishers have acknowledged that traditional publicity processes have been surpassed by community content trends and the recommendations of consumer reviewers on SM. In 2017, department store John Lewis reported that a Bookstagram content trend (#shelfie) was responsible for increasing their bookshelf sales by 11%, and even more recently we are seeing the exceptional direct impact BookTok is having on book sales (Heath, 2017). Often cited as the first ‘BookTok phenomenon’, We Were Liars was a bestselling Young Adult novel when it was first published in 2014. In early 2021, the book started to be featured in one of the community’s viral content trends, and the reach of these videos triggered a sales increase of 35%, rocketing the title back onto international bestseller charts for the first time in six years (Cortez, 2021). The industry was compelled to mobilise and coordinate its own marketing efforts to further capitalise on the opportunity (Harris, 2021).

More than ever before, the consumer is taking on an active, if indirect, role in the book marketing process. Yet, with 64% of contemporary consumers now indicating that they expect to be able to make meaningful online connections and have personal interactions with brands, it is debatable whether publishers are equally invested in connecting with their consumers (Sprout Social, 2018). Digital customer experience specialists have argued that, when compared with similar consumer brands, publishers have not yet wholly realised the true value of their SM communities or the full potential of our ever-evolving digital ecosystem (Doxee, 2021). They recommend that publishers realign their digital marketing strategies to the social element of SM, ‘triggering a virtuous cycle’ between publishers and their followers (Ibid).

Publisher Activity, Inactivity and Reactivity on Social Media

The prevalence of SM platforms and apps, and the potential user reach afforded by these environments, has made the use of SMM increasingly important for brands to engage directly with their consumers. If a ‘proximity […] to the individual reader’ is now the most valuable position for the industry to pursue, why is this not reflected on publisher SM accounts? A critical study investigating publisher activity on SM was undertaken by Nolan and Dane (2018). Their review compares key studies from Thoring (2011) and Hughes (2017) to illustrate how the industry’s approach to SMM has dramatically changed over the last decade. As the accepted platform of preference for publishers and ‘literary insiders’, the collected data focusses on Twitter account activity. Early marketing data reports had indicated that ‘social networking [sites should be] about conversations and community-building’, and Thoring’s 2011 study showed that ‘the majority of tweets posted by publishers [at this time] contained no promotion’. This clearly demonstrates that publishers understood the value of connectivity on SM. However, Hughes’ 2017 study found that approximately ‘80% of tweets contained content directly related to titles on the publishers’ lists’. This suggests that, despite recognising the early potential for direct-to-consumer (D2C) engagement and community-building, publishers have largely disregarded the social element, instead becoming dependent on the rich consumer data analytics integrated into these platforms. The industry has pivoted away from community-driven marketing towards performance marketing and an algorithmic-driven strategy (Sieck, 2021). Though, admittedly, consumer data is exceedingly valuable, it is far from the only thing to be gained from SMM:

SMM is more than just sharing wisdom with a captivated audience […] maintaining a community of engaged and active followers is now a vital part of both the marketing of books and the understanding of what readers want.

– Nolan and Dane (2018)

It is only through further investment in, and resourcing of, a SMM strategy focussed on direct consumer interaction that publishers will be able to build the meaningful connections that are so critical to contemporary consumers.

It could be argued that the consumer publishing sector’s, now standard, use of the influencer marketing ecosystem as a part of its digital strategies, marketing, and publicity campaigns, is evidence of consumer relationship and community building. As previously implied, the word-of-mouth (WOM) recommendations generated through influencer marketing and publicity partnerships in social media communities like Bookstagram and BookTube have proven to be especially beneficial for publishers. The influence of WOM recommendation on sales had been noted since the early days of Amazon customer reviews and data analytics, but with ‘the BookTok effect’ disrupting the digital marketing environment once again, publishers and authors have had to acknowledge that readers are now the ones ‘creating bestsellers in ways that [they] cannot’ (Murray, 2021). In response, influencer programmes and PR partnerships with book-bloggers are becoming an increasingly significant part of marketing and publicity strategies, particularly for consumer fiction imprints. Picador of Pan Macmillan, Penguin General of Penguin Random House and Orion of Hachette have all developed methods specifically for communicating with bloggers, from proof sign-up forms to insider programmes operated through separate SM channels.

Persistent Resistance

However, publisher dependence on blogger partnerships, as well as the comparable promotional activity being taken on by authors, represents a further misunderstanding of the contemporary consumer’s desire for direct brand engagement and dialogue (Crawford, 2009). Although it may be the most time and cost-effective option for the publisher, this deferral of personal opinion means that readers are still left struggling to connect with publishers. It seems that, while there is not an immediate fiscal incentive to build these consumer connections, most publishers will continue to use their accounts as promotional echo chambers and allow the influencer ecosystem to lead the conversations around their products.

As the industry looks ahead to the possible challenges it may face and the opportunities it should aim to exploit over the coming years, one thing features resoundingly at the top of the collective agenda: social media. Following marketing research into the importance of online brand engagement for consumers, the industry is realising that the potential of SM for promoting their products and building consumer loyalty and brand value is only increasing with the continual creation of new media formats, platforms and routes to market. BookMachine’s marketing trend summary places influencer marketing at the top of the list of definitive strategies for the new year, and HubSpot’s trend survey found that the four most common approaches global marketing professionals plan to invest in all relate to social media and mobile optimisation (Bump, 2022). Most notably, their data showed that ‘67% of marketers plan to increase their investment in TikTok’, with 10% of these stating that it will be the platform they focus the majority of their SM investment on. However, at the time of writing only a handful of publishers have created accounts on the platform and even fewer are actively engaging with the community.

In his ‘2022 Industry Predictions Statement’, Bloomsbury CEO Nigel Newton specifically named BookTok as an essential community to integrate and evolve with in the coming years (LinkedIn, 2022). Interestingly, Bloomsbury was one of the first publishers to adopt the platform, having started creating regular content to appeal specifically to the user demographic in mid-2020 when the flood of lockdown app downloads first began. They currently have 24,000 followers, with some of their videos gaining hundreds-of-thousands of views. Other consumer publishers, particularly those with expansive YA lists, should consider following Bloomsbury’s lead.

Print Is Certainly Not Dead, But the Future of Book Marketing Is Digital

As the digital environment appears to be shifting once again, it is becoming clear that it is ‘consumer behaviour that will dictate the survival of both print and digital technology’ (Adāzing, 2019). We can see the ripples of this shift already as TikTok challenges Facebook by destabilising their decade long social media market monopoly. Having reported an end to its user growth for the first time in the company’s lifetime and seeing a subsequent 26% drop in company stock value, opportunities for new, innovative platforms and technologies will provide fresh communication opportunities for publishers to explore (Molina and Guynn, 2022). What is still left for the contemporary industry to consider, is how the digital marketing environment may continue evolving and how they might better identify, embrace and exploit its potential. Now operating in a crucial marketing environment which is in a near-continuous state of fluctuation and reinvention, the publishing industry must continue to adapt to these rapid changes by embracing the disruption as opportunity.

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