In this week’s episode of The Publisher Podcast, we speak to Hannah Ballantyne, Senior Social Media Manager at Which?, a not-for-profit consumer-focused publication. Hannah contributed to a fascinating article in InPublishing late last year about steering the brand’s debut on TikTok; a strategy which has won the team awards.

With the ongoing saga between platforms, publishers and politicians showing no signs of cooling, we had a timely conversation about which platforms they prioritise at Which?, how they assess the value of social media to the publication, and meeting the publication’s goals of sharing impartial expert advice to empower consumers. Hannah also explains why dishwasher and pothole content is taking off, even with younger audiences.

Here are some highlights, lightly edited for clarity:

Focusing on quality output

I’m a big fan of, ‘Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.’ Putting out things just because you can, can have a detrimental effect. It’s about staying true to what you’re trying to achieve, and really focusing on that quality output.

Lots of brands jump on trends and bandwagons. There are instances of where it can work brilliantly, like the recent ‘If Gen Z wrote the marketing script’, Curry’s did a brilliant excecution of this, they hit it at the right point… So if you do it right, it can be incredibly effective.

But you need to think carefully as a brand; is it going to jar with your audience? Are you going to be able to execute it in an authentic way, or is it going to look like you’re jumping on a bandwagon?

For me, what you promise is what you should deliver. That’s a lens we apply to a lot of our content. We’ve got a fantastic video and audio production team, and we work closely with stakeholders across the business, so all of our content editors, producers, researchers, video team designers, and also our campaigns and advocacy team.

That’s one of the things that’s really exciting from a social media point, is that we get to work with so many different people across the business, and social media is very much viewed by our leadership team as core to who we are, but also what we want to become, so it’s seen as strategically important.

Testing new channels

I’ve got an amazing team that are responsible for all our output across our channels as well as inbound engagement. They are constantly looking for new opportunities. For example, recently we did a lot of work around things like Black Friday and Amazon Prime days, where we’re highlighting deals that our experts have uncovered. But not just from a price point of view – we only recommend products that have also done well in our tests rather than just, this is a bargain.

That’s the approach we take because we’re very much about helping people get it right when it comes to making those purchasing decisions. My team proposed that we created an Instagram broadcast channel specifically to highlight those best deals. For those people who were in the market for identifying some good deals, it was then a way to have a dedicated place where we could be sending links to the various deals pages.

We’ve also fairly recently introduced the use of [DM automation tool] ManyChat on our Instagram. Instagram is quite limited in terms of driving traffic, and that’s one of our big goals. We want to send people back to the Which? website, whether it’s [to] a helpful consumer rights template, or point them to a guide with more information.

Which?’s TikTok success

We launched on TikTok in February 2023, and we’re now at almost 100,000 followers… and we’ve had over 56 million views in that time. The top performing themes are dishwashers, saving energy… What to do if your car is damaged by a pothole. That was the very first video we put out on TikTok, because at [that] time of year, there’s been ice, which exacerbates the pothole issue. So it was a great piece to go to launch with. We achieved over a million views with our very first video, which was brilliant.

There is the perception that TikTok is very young, and it is a place where you can attract younger audiences. But I think you’d be surprised at how broad the demographic actually is on TikTok. It isn’t just young people at all… One of the most interesting things on TikTok is that’s probably where, for Which? content, we see more of an even balance of male and female, whereas a lot of our other channels are more female-skewed.

Our social media presence is a brilliant gateway for people to discover Which?. There are some very young people who don’t know who Which? is, but whose parents or grandparents [know] or get the magazines. So it’s just a brilliant way to show how relevant we are, and in these days, being able to stand out as a trusted source of expert advice is incredibly important.


This season of The Publisher Podcast & Newsletter is sponsored by Memberful, a best-in-class membership solution for independent publishers and journalists who want to diversify their revenue stream and connect with their audience. 

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