The School Reunion: Competitive Readalong
Team Tandem loves a good challenge and we’re always looking for ways in which we can innovate our Readalongs, to get the best results for our clients. In January, we, therefore, jumped at the chance to run our first-ever competitive Readalong celebrating the release of The School Reunion by Shalini Boland, in collaboration with our friends at Amazon Publishing.
The client was keen to create a lot of buzz around this title and our brief was to generate as much content and engagement as possible, by working with creators of different sizes, from nano-influencers, (under 1,5k followers), to midi-influencers, (10k followers).
Tandem has worked with micro-creators since its beginning; our campaign data and metrics tell us that micro-creators have the highest engagement rate on Instagram, and we wanted to put this to the test with this new campaign format…
What is a competitive Readalong?
The School Reunion campaign consisted of a 60 person Instagram Readalong, whereby the participants were split into 3 groups of 20, based on their follower size:
Group A: Creators with up to 1,5k followers
Group B: Creators with 1,5 - 2,5k followers
Group C: Creators with 2,5 - 10k followers
On publication date, we launched 3 concurrent Readalongs, each supported by a Tandem Campaign Manager. The participants knew that they were split into groups, but weren’t told that they had been grouped by their follower count. We introduced the competition element at the start of the Readalong, announcing that the group to create the most content by the end of the activity would win a prize. We did not reveal the prize at this stage, yet our organic creators really embraced this challenge and were determined to win! This prompted a healthy competition between the groups, and we saw a surge in content across the week; it also promoted a supportive atmosphere within the community, with participants engaging with each other's posts.
Search #TheSchoolReunionReadalong to see the content produced by our community!
The Results
Overall, our community produced over 800 pieces of organic content on Instagram alone, including Feed-Posts, Reels and Stories.
The group that created the most content was the nano-creators (under 1,5k followers) - double the amount of the other two groups!
In terms of engagement rate, the highest scoring group was Group C, the midi-creators, but very closely followed by the nano-creators. Both of these groups performed really strongly, achieving engagement rates well over and above the Tandem Readalong benchmarks.
This is further evidence that small, emerging accounts are even more eager to engage and closer to their followers.
The prize for the winning group was an exclusive interview with the author, as well as a spin-off Readalong of the author’s previous title: The Silent Bride, which contributed to additional hype around the Readalong and the author.
Feedback from the community
One of the best campaigns I’ve been on. Thanks so much everyone!
Another fun Readalong and a new author for me - already adding her books to my TBR : )
Thoroughly enjoyed taking part in this Readalong.
I loved the Readalong and the people on the Readalong were lovely, the experience itself is so amazing!
What a wonderful supportive group!
Additional elements
The organic activation on Instagram was complimented by paid activity on TikTok, where 10 paid creators produced 2 videos each, one corresponding to a current trend, and another to an evergreen challenge. This was so that we could compare which creative challenges were the most effective: whilst evergreen challenges had the highest engagement rate, we found that having a mix of trends and evergreen content in creative challenges produced the best results.
In addition to the above, Team Tandem really got behind this Readalong, with our in-house thriller correspondents posting regular reading updates on TikTok and Instagram.
The School Reunion is an example of how we can combine organic and paid activity to ensure great visibility and engagement for your title!