The Korean k-pop group, BTS, has quickly emerged as one of the most popular worldwide acts as of 2018, generating massive audiences through various live performances and appearances that are often streamed to a global audience. While the band’s quirky and upbeat sound has contributed to their success, marketing and promotion strategies can also be seen as one of the main factors for BTS’s sheer audience sizes. The band maintains an active presence on numerous social media platforms, such as Twitter and Youtube, while also making their music widely accessible on online platforms such as Spotify. BTS’s savvy use of social media can be seen in three key ways: 1) producing and releasing content featuring behind-the-scenes footage, as well as a slew of candid selfies, all of which act to humanize the band members and make them more relatable; 2) encouraging fans to act as influencers on social media platforms such as YouTube, which increases brand awareness and generates excitement; and 3) making live performance content available on multiple platforms, which also significantly increases the band’s exposure to global audiences, particularly for those who might otherwise not be familiar with the band, or k-pop in general (Cho, 2018).
There are several advantages of social media promotion over traditional forms of promotion, such as television commercials or produced music videos. While BTS does create music videos that are made available on platforms such as YouTube (ibighit, 2018), it also relies on extensive behind-the-scenes footage that many bands do not incorporate as part of a concerted promotion effort. One primary advantage of using social media platforms is that there is minimal, if any, actual costs. While television commercials require paying a network to air the commercial, content on social media can be hosted for free. Additionally, social media also makes content seem more organic in nature, in that it does not actively seek to promote a product in the same way that television commercials are constantly seen as trying to sell to the consumer (Tuten and Solomon, 2017). BTS’s strategy has been to humanize the various band members through social media content; while part of their image is created through the highly produced music videos they do create, an equal part comes from seeing selfies taken by band members on their Twitter feed, or taking short clips of various dance rehearsals. This sort of ‘real-life’ content can often generate more excitement than highly-produced content, as it personalizes each of the band members in a way that makes them seem more relatable to the average fan. This increases a level of engagement between viewer and content-creator in ways that traditional media forms cannot replicate, and the overall effect has been a drastic increase in the band’s visibility (DeVries et al., 2012).
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Second, while many musical artists see sharing of their media on various social media platforms as a potential threat, due to a loss of copyright control, BTS has encouraged their fans to share their music as much as possible. One of the most prominent areas where this can be seen is on YouTube, through a phenomenon known as reaction videos. Reaction videos involve YouTubers, also known as influencers, who will stream various content while showing their own personal reactions to what is being displayed on screen (Cho, 2018). Thus, a typical reaction video might involve an influencer streaming the latest BTS video, while simultaneously being seen giddy with excitement as the video plays. The advantage created by these reaction videos is that BTS is effectively expanding their audience. While BTS might host a music video on their own YouTube page, they are also having their content streamed in various reaction videos by many other channels, some of which have followers in the millions.
Third, BTS encourages their fans to share content from their appearances through various live-sharing platforms, she as Facebook Live or YouTube streams, whenever they perform or make a promotional appearance (Cho, 2018). Fans are encouraged to stream their concerts on their own channels, which bypasses many copyright restrictions of sharing televised network broadcasts. Fans who attend concerts might also stream the concert on a social media channel, while live promotional appearances are also regularly streamed on multiple channels. Similar to its influencer strategy, this encouragement of fan-generated content also widely expands their overall reach.
Social media relies heavily on trending topics. By understanding how social media platforms work to promote content, all of these strategies by BTS have paid off. When thousands of social media channels and pages are devoted to BTS, the result is that BTS will often have their videos marked as ‘trending’ by YouTube algorithms, sending their content to the top of YouTube’s Recommended page. The number of video clips or BTS-related posts on Twitter, with the accompanying BTS hashtag, will also send BTS content to the top of Twitter. This expands audiences even further, because even people who are completely unfamiliar with BTS, such as those who do not subscribe to any influencer channels, will still see BTS at the top of their social media feeds through various recommended pages. Thus, BTS has been able to capitalize on social media to the fullest extent; they show an innate understanding of how social media capitalizes on various trends, and they have created a marketing and promotion strategy that caters specifically to these platforms. While many other artists see social media as a complementary promotional strategy to more traditional forms, such as highly-produced music videos, BTS has gone all-in on a dedicated social media strategy that has clearly worked out in their favor.
- Cho, M. (2018). 3 Ways that BTS and its fans are redefining liveness. FLOW.Journal. Accessible online at http://www.flowjournal.org/2018/05/bts-and-its-fans/
- De Vries, L., Gensler, S., & Leeflang, P. S. (2012). Popularity of brand posts on brand fan pages: An investigation of the effects of social media marketing. Journal of interactive marketing, 26(2), 83-91.
- Ibighit. (2018). Official BTS Youtube Channel. Accessible online at https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC3IZKseVpdzPSBaWxBxundA
- Tuten, T. L., & Solomon, M. R. (2017). Social media marketing. Sage.
