Is K-Pop the Key to Social Media Success?

Posted on by Jake Smith

Vice is a media company that creates online news content for young adults. The company oversees a variety of verticals under its name, including Vice News, music blog Noisey, and fashion magazine i-D, among others. Each entity falls under the company’s mission of providing interesting and newsworthy content to a millennial audience. Vice is owned by co-founder Shane Smith, the Walt Disney Company, and A+E Networks. What started as a free magazine has grown into a global news outlet with a powerful social media presence.

Crowdtangle showed a significant spike for Vice on October 11. The tweet was a video of an interview with worldwide sensation BTS, a hugely popular K-pop band.

For the Boolean search on Twitter’s advanced search option, we searched [“@VICE” AND “@bts_twt”] to focus on tweets that included tweets from @VICE including @bts_twt. When searching [from:@VICE “@bts_twt”], the search narrowed, displaying more Vice articles covering BTS, including an article about BTS’s show on Noisey. Using this deeper search, we noticed that relatively few tweets from the main @VICE handle mentioned BTS compared to its satellite brands. In order to get an idea of the general conversation surrounding BTS alone, we removed Vice from the TweetDeck search. Our exact search was [BTS, OR @bts_twt] and we set the engagement to ten to filter out lower-performing content. This search returned tweets that demonstrate the extreme devotion of the BTS fandom, like the one below.

Based on our research, Vice should absolutely consider engaging in the growing hype around BTS. The band is well within the realm of youth-based content that Vice would normally cover, so a focus on the band could benefit the news site without appearing out of the ordinary or off-brand. Based on our searches, if Vice were to engage with BTS’s fandom, the engagement could drive their social media to new heights.

 

Group members: Annaya English, Rafy Evans, Annie Farber, Quincy Nolan, Jake Smith

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