TikTok, BookTok.. What makes customers Ti(c)k?
The #BookTok Trend
2021 has been the best-selling year in the US for print books, with 825 million copies sold (+9% vs 2020), and TikTok heavily contributed to this success. TikTok’s influence started in 2020 with the hashtag #BookTok. Indeed, during the pandemic, many tiktokers started to post on their accounts quotes from books they read and short, funny, and entertaining books reviews. That was it. These posts started to increase in visibility through views and likes and a proper community of bookworms started to gravitate around this hashtag. As of today, TikToks tagged with #BookTok have received 41.8 billion views — and several individual TikToks with the tag have more than 10 million views each. With these impressive numbers is easy to explain the ripple effect that the trend had on the book industry. Let me give you a few examples.
The Song of Achilles by Madeline Miller, published in 2012, sold 650,000 copies in 2021 and ranked as the fourth best-selling Adult Fiction book.
It Ends With Us by Collen Hoover, sold 21,000 copies till 2016 and in 2021, after being featured on #BookTok, it sold more than 770,000 copies and became the overall sixth-best selling book of the year.
As you can imagine, this trend has been noticed also by book publishers and retailers who created their own TikTok accounts and got in touch with book influencers. Barnes & Noble (US bookstore) started to advertise in their stores the trending titles on TikTok as “BookTok favourites” as you can see here below.
(AP Photo/Tali Arbel). ASSOCIATED PRESS
In the end, is important to highlight how this trend impacted mainly Adult and Young Adult Fiction which saw impressive sales growth in 2021 (+25% vs 2020). This is entirely driven by the fact that more than 60% of TikTok users are aged under 30 and most of them are Gen Z (16-24) readers.
Final considerations
It is still uncertain if these trends could have an impact in the long run or if they are just momentary. Especially because they are still shown inside a platform that offers continuously engaging material with only a swipe and because the short video should convey the main message in a seamless and direct way, or it will loose the attention of its viewers.
Looking at it on a company side, some brands are trying to explore TikTok and its marketing opportunities, but the key to successful viral trends is still unclear to many. In the end, we could probably agree on three main takeaways:
The impressive reach of audience this platform and these trends have with the opportunity to get in touch directly with young (under 30) people that could become also future customers;
The creation of a simple format like these short engaging videos is easily scalable and replicable. In this way creating a viral trend with a limited budget could become reality (but remember, not all that glitters is gold);
Opportunity to measure clearly the impact of any activity in terms of views, likes, and other digital KPIs.
