How to Evolve a Legacy Brand’s Social Strategy
I talked to Indira Birnie, Sr. Audience and Marketing Manager at the Booker Prize Foundation, about shedding the prize's hoity-toity reputation.
There’s not usually a lot of drama in the Link in Bio Discord.
But on August 7th, a member shared a screenshot of The Booker Prizes' broadcast channel in the Discord’s “Yikes” channel. The background of the broadcast channel was BRAT themed. The announcement copy used a lot of emojis. To some people in the Discord, it didn’t feel like the tone of an organization that gives out one of the most prestigious literary awards.
Despite the Discord member checking for someone who worked at the Booker Prize Foundation before posting, this message came through the next day: “👀 lol, awk. i'm the smm at the booker prize... wasn't expecting to see that but interesting to see how it's going down with people here.”
What could have been a very uncomfortable interaction, turned into one of the most productive, interesting conversations we’ve had in the Discord.
Indira Birnie, senior audience and marketing manager at the Booker Prize Foundation, understood the feedback and shared how she’s been working on evolving the brand’s social media strategy. While people view the prize as highbrow, “to us, it's all about reading and, crucially, the enjoyment of reading,” she said in the Discord.
The member who sent the original message about the BRAT background happens to run a Booker of the Month Club, is a true fan of the award, and acknowledged her POV might be “a little stuck in between where you were and where you’re going”. We all talked about how difficult it can be to gently move a brand’s social strategy in a new direction, while not doing a hard pivot.
Good change takes time. There are awkward growing pains. It’s usually worth it. As I scroll through The Booker Prizes’ account today, there are multiple Reels that have over 1M views and their Broadcast Channel now has over 3,700 members.
I am so excited to share today’s interview with Indira Birnie, Senior Audience and Marketing Manager at the Booker Prize Foundation. We talk about the hard work of evolving an account, why she prioritizes non-follower reach, and the importance of asking “what is the point of this?”.
I want to note that I got permission from both the Discord member and Indira to include the above story in today’s newsletter. I would never share anything from the Link in Bio Discord without permission. You can learn more about the community here.
Rachel Karten: First can you tell me about your current role and any previous social (or not!) roles you've had?
Indira Birnie: I’m senior audience and marketing manager at the Booker Prize Foundation, so I lead on social—that includes content creation, community engagement and strategy—as well as any other marketing initiatives that comes my way.
I’ve spent the majority of my career to date at the place where I started out, Random House (and then Penguin Random House), where I worked for almost 13 years. If you go further back, I was a bookseller for a long time, my first official job at 16. Books have been a part of my career (and my life) pretty much the whole time!
RK: How would you describe The Booker Prizes social strategy?
IB: It’s about being reader-focused and making sure the brand feels accessible. We want to show that Booker Prize books are for everyone—that they can be meaningful and challenging but also fun and enjoyable.
Beyond awarding the two Booker Prizes each year, we’re currently fine-tuning our mission and vision—that means our social strategy might shift a bit in the near future. At its core, we want the Booker Prize to be a part of the modern entertainment line-up—reading has never gone out of fashion so our work should sit alongside whatever you might be watching, listening to, or otherwise engaging with.
RK: What sort of strategy shifts have you been working on?
IB: A great thing about a brand like this is that I had a ready-made audience when I started this job. People, for the most part, know who we are and what we do on a basic level. But it does come with another challenge—which is to shift existing views and assumptions. That can sometimes be harder than building an audience from scratch.
I think some people have this view of us as hoity-toity and elitist—or think that reading Booker books must be challenging and worthy. The Booker Prize has a long cultural history so while that perception may be rooted in how it has previously functioned, it’s not how we still operate.
Our chief executive, Gaby Wood, wrote something for our Facebook Book Club (our private Facebook Group) earlier this year, which I think adds useful context here:
“Several years ago we stopped using the phrase ‘literary fiction’ altogether. Great writers work in many forms and the notion of whether something was or wasn’t a ‘Booker book’ was holding judges back. Now we tell each judging panel, as they begin their work, that there is no such thing as a Booker book because it will be whatever their collective tastes make it. Crime novels, sci-fi novels, graphic novels, novels that are interlinked short stories and novel-length poems have all been longlisted in the last few years.”
I do understand why the tone of voice in the broadcast channel might have seemed weird—but to us, it's all about reading and, crucially, the enjoyment of reading. I’ve been trying to move our social strategy on so the content we’re putting out reflects that…and you have to start somewhere! This TOV isn't right for all our channels but it is working for us on Instagram especially.
RK: Why was it important for you to evolve the account? I think it's so easy to get comfortable in a routine (or strategy) with social. You weren't satisfied it seems and pushed to make some changes.
IB: I think it’s important to speak in the language of the place in which we’re operating, and we weren’t really doing that. Our editorial team has only existed for the past couple of years and I’m the first (and currently only) in-house person on social. We have a great freelancer, Daisey, who ran the channels before I started (and who continues to work alongside me now) but without a specific social strategy to direct her work, it was mostly about maintenance. So it was with that new starter energy that I wanted to think about our content more strategically and try new things.
In the past year or so, I’ve been making changes to our tone of voice, creating more social-only and social-first content, and keeping a close eye on how people are responding. That has meant a shift to offering more value by putting more of the content in the post and engaging where they already are rather than constantly asking them to tap off elsewhere. I was here for over a year before posting something as zany as the BRAT generator post so it’s not like I went from 0 to 100!
Finally, last year we did some research to support the International Booker Prize and the results showed that almost half of the translated fiction bought in the UK is purchased by people under 35—an online-savvy demographic who we can better speak to by evolving our social strategy.
RK: Can you talk to me about some of the most impactful changes that you've implemented?
IB: Tone of voice is definitely one of them—developing a warmer and more approachable voice that we can dial up or down as needed. Not to go on about the BRAT post but it has been a watershed moment that has allowed for more experimentation. That post showed that our audience enjoyed us having a sense of personality as well as cared about the individuals behind the scenes.
The other key one is simply producing more content with the platform in mind, especially video and image carousels. It never fails to surprise me how popular some of the easiest videos, low-key and filmed on a phone, can be. We’ve recently started using Butter too, which has been helpful in adding variety. It’s quite straightforward at the moment but it’s working for us, performance-wise, and helping to shift the brand’s perception little by little.
RK: Are you able to share any numbers to support the impact? Directionally I can see your engagement seems to be up on Instagram.
IB: The stats that I’m particularly interested in right now are the follower vs non-follower reach and saves. It’s annoying that the former doesn’t seem to be a standard metric across all posts so I don’t have a proper benchmark but, anecdotally, a number of posts I’d shared before the BRAT post all had a non-follower reach of under 10%. The BRAT post had a 31% non-follower reach.
More recently, since the carousel limit has increased to 20 images (a blessing for a prize with 13-book longlists!), we’ve started experimenting with carousels as another way to share book recommendations. One of the first we posted, on heartbreaking reads from the ‘Booker Library’ (our archive of previously long- and shortlisted, and winning books), had a non-follower reach of 52.3% and over 4,000 saves. Again, I can’t properly benchmark this, but previous posts generally had saves in the low tens or hundreds.
So, it’s positive to see that the work we are doing is increasingly reaching out of our core audience and finding resonance there.
RK: How have you been using private communities like the broadcast channel and your Facebook Group?
IB: We started our Facebook Group just over a year ago as a place for early and exclusive content, behind the scenes intel, and special competitions. It’s a hugely active space and we’ve just hit 25K members. We set out thinking of the group as an insiders’ track but we’ve realised that that’s not necessarily what the audience wants from us.
More recently, we’ve come to see the FB Group as a digital book club; a place where we can facilitate conversation between Booker Prize superfans (they are so well-read!) from across the world. We’re thinking of trialling an online live session to see if something like a real-time book club discussion might be popular with members.
Meanwhile, the broadcast channel now feels like the insiders’ track—a space where we can post those early or exclusive things or ask for input or thoughts on future plans. It also feels like the right space for more lightness, somewhere we can bring out the sillier tone of voice or post memes we wouldn’t share on the feed.
RK: Some of your recent videos have gotten great engagement. What would you credit that to?
IB: Definitely—the short, simple videos often perform the best! I do think it’s mostly down to creating more videos with Reels in mind and not being afraid to be more playful where we can.
For example, we used to reveal our Monthly Spotlight book with a still image, but since I switched to announcing them with a short video, it’s always amongst the best performing content of the month even though it’s very functional.
Carousels have been performing really well for us too; I expected this one of our longlist authors’ writing spaces to do well but it performed better than I thought and I loved reading all the comments on the post.
It’s worth adding that we do support some of our content with paid each month; that encompasses any big launches, such as our shortlist films, and regular Monthly Spotlight features, and other priority editorial content.
RK: What's a recent post that you're proud of? Why did it work?
IB: I really loved making this Reel of reading recommendations that we shared around the Euros because it’s just so silly. I mean, it does offer some great book recs! But filming the finger football match was a fun and funny moment in the office and I think that lightness translates through the screen.
We’re currently rolling out video Q&As with the Booker Prize 2024 shortlistees and I really wanted to shift the vibe so they felt different from how we’ve done these in the past. Authors seem to get asked the same questions about their writing and inspirations on repeat, so we wanted these video interviews to give more of an insight into the author as a person.
Also, at this point in the Booker Prize cycle, we’re in-between the shortlist and winner stages and have already published written Q&As with each author and lots of book-focused content on our website, so we didn’t want any overlap. Working closely with my colleague Donna, we took inspiration from the Vogue 73 questions format and drafted a long list of potential questions about their books and their craft, but also about all sorts of other things. It’s a format that’s feels fresh for us and crucially, the authors were game for our, as one of them put it, “strange questions”. I especially enjoyed my interview with Percival Everett in which his dog made a surprise appearance.
RK: What do you love about working for The Booker Prizes?
IB: Truly, it’s the people. We’re a tiny organisation and I think our output is crazy given the amount of people doing the work. It wouldn’t be nearly as enjoyable without excellent colleagues!
Also, being trusted and supported and, for the most part, left to my own devices on social. I think it’s that atmosphere that’s led to feeling able take some calculated risks (that have generally paid off!).
On a more minor level, having worked at a publishing house for so long, I’m enjoying being on another side of the industry, and working at a non-profit is a new and interesting perspective too.
RK: What advice would you give another social pro who is looking to evolve and shift their brand's social strategy?
IB: I think my colleagues are getting sick of me asking “what is the point of this?”. But any strategy shifts should lead back to a solid purpose, so I’d always start there.
Secondly, I feel like we, as people who work in social (and especially people in small organisations), have so much to think about and are always looking to the new. It can be easy to forget about or overlook the basics and work through incremental changes.
And, lastly, try not to do it all at once—you can only do so much!
Thanks so much for reading!
I’ve updated the The Link in Bio Running List of Post Ideas! There are now 93 formats on the list.
The results for the 2024 Social Media Compensation Survey came out this month. We’ll have more data around how we are all feeling in a few weeks.
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See you next week. I think. Maybe this newsletter will be a good Tuesday distraction?
Great interview! I always like to see behind the scenes of the major prizes. Also, I keep seeing references to the Discord. I am a paid subscriber and never got an invite. Is there still a way to get access to that?