Content Creation – The Pros and Cons of Different Social Media

Content creation is something that most of you reading this blog will enjoy doing. But it’s also something that can take up a lot of time. With so many different social media platforms out there, it can be hard to decide which will work best for you. There’s no point in wasting all your time and energy doing them all. Especially not if you’re not enjoying doing so.

With that in mind, I decided to write up a little post on the pros and cons of each of the main social media platforms you can use for creating bookish content. You can use these to decide which you might want to try out and which won’t work for you!

Book Blogs

Pros

• Long-form written content – if you enjoy writing, you’ll enjoy doing this
• Fairly easily customisable, so most blogs won’t look the same
• Publishers in the UK still love bloggers
• It’s easy to schedule content without a separate app or site.

Cons

• They’re not viewed as often as other social media
• It can take a long time to arrange any and all content
• If you want to personalise completely you’ll need to pay out on most blog hosts

Obviously, I love to blog, so I’m going to have positive things to say about running one. But it really has to be something that you can make a commitment to. Like with other social media, you ideally should have some sort of posting schedule in place. And since writing posts can take a while, it can feel like a second job. So make sure you have plenty of ideas for posts and that you want to do this.

Booktube

Pros

• A good variety in content means you can talk about a lot of books
• Publishers in the US love booktubers
• It’s a fun way to play around with what content you can make

Cons

• It can take a long time to film and edit content
• Reviews don’t tend to do as well
• It can be hard to break into the community at first

I personally have a love/hate relationship with booktube. I adore watching it and definitely get a lot of book recommendations for it. And a small part of me would love to become a consistent part of the community. But I’m also not a hugely visual person, and I loathe editing with a passion. My more recent attempts at videos have taken less time for sure, but I’m still not as in love with it.

The thing to remember with booktube is that if you want to get into it, you’ll need to make it your main focus for content creation. Viewers like to see things like vlogs, hauls, wrap-ups etc. All types of videos which take a while to film and even longer to edit. If you like working on videos, this is going to be a great way to combine the two things. And you really can have fun and do some creative things with your content. It’s definitely worth doing if that’s where your interests lie. Just remember that it’ll be slow to start getting known.

Bookstagram

Pros

• It’s pretty easy to produce batches of content in a short period
• There are ways to make sure your content gets seen
• There are a lot of tour companies for bookstagram
• You can get pretty creative if you’re good at editing

Cons

• The Instagram algorithm
• If you’re not interested in making reels, it can be hard to get seen
• You really do have to be willing to post very regularly – more so than any other service

I’d say that bookstagram is definitely a favourite platform of mine. I’ve discovered a lot of new books, especially self-pubbed books. I’ve been on there for a good few years now, but my growth has been slow. And growth is the main problem some new users will have. Tags are supposed to help you get seen, but with so many posts being put up regularly…good luck. You need saves, shares, likes and comments for your posts to start appearing in more people’s feeds. Reels will help a lot if you’re posting them regularly. But a lot of people don’t go on Instagram for video content.

There are definitely tricks to getting noticed on Instagram. You can join follow trains, you can join like/save groups or participate in things, like tours where your posts will be picked up by others. It can be a lot of work if you’re planning on doing all that, but the actual photo taking? You can get that done in a few hours or a day, at most. Once you have a backlist of photos, it’s just working out when to post them and what captions to write.

If you’re not sure whether content creation is for you, I’d start with bookstagram to see what you like and dislike about it. It can even give you a little bit of practice with video before you move on to booktok or booktube.

Booktok

Pros

• Publishers everywhere are really into TikTok right now
• Even if you don’t use TikTok – the popular books on there can help any content you create on them do well
• It’s video content but short form with editing tools in-app so you don’t need to spend out
• It’s easier than booktube to get your videos seen so you can grow fast

Cons

• There’s not as much you can do creatively yet due to time constraints
• If you’re not talking about popular books – you might not do as well
• Like Twitter, this is a platform where plenty of arguments live so be aware.

This is the one platform I’ve not really used yet. I am giving it a try, but since I don’t watch much booktok…yeah, I’m still not sure what I’m doing there. But it’s not a platform that can be ignored.

TikTok is growing massively, and a lot of books are getting popular because of it. If you want to be a part of making trends or catching them just before the books start selling out? This might be the platform for you. Like YouTube, it is video content, but the videos don’t need to take as long. Though you can spend a long time filming and editing, time constraints mean you never have to worry about editing anything hours long.

Out of all the platforms on this list, I would say this is the one to really keep your eye on. It’s still newish compared to the other platforms, and I wouldn’t be surprised if there are a lot of new and exciting things to come on there.