Last year, South Korean entertainment material dominated pop culture debates on Twitter, thanks to the virality of K-pop bands like BTS and Black pink, as well as K-dramas like Squid Game and Hell bound. This trend is projected to continue in 2022.
On the social media site, more than 7.8 billion engagements with K-pop music and performers occurred last year, compared to 6.7 billion engagements in 2020.
BTS, NCT, Enhypen, EXO, Blackpink, Tomorrow X Together (TXT), Treasure, Seventeen, Ateez, and Stray Kids were the most popular K-pop acts on Twitter in 2021.
K-pop talks outnumber all other pop culture debates on Twitter, according to YeonJeong Kim, Twitter’s global head of K-pop and K-content partnerships. In comparison, esports and gaming, another large group on the platform, had 2.4 billion engagements in 2021.
In 2021, the most tweets on K-pop came from Indonesia, the Philippines, South Korea, Thailand, and the United States, and these countries, along with Japan, had the most K-pop enthusiasts.
Each country’s audience has its own particular tastes and favorite performers, while new artist popularity tends to follow South Korean trends. In the top ten nations, BTS was the most talked about K-pop artist, while NCT dominated the conversation in Thailand. “K-pop fans are really different, but they are all united at the same time,” Kim explains.
She claims that last year, Twitter recognized India and Latin American nations as the most important developing markets for K-pop on the site.
Users in Generation Z are particularly active, according to Kim, who claims that many began using the site in part, if not entirely, because of the size of the K-pop talks on it.
According to Kim, “K-content” – Twitter’s umbrella word for all aspects of South Korean culture and pop culture discussed on the platform – had a historic year, owing in part to conversations sparked by popular K-drama series like Squid Game.
According to Kim, the fact that Twitter is a conversational network for K-pop fans has helped to expand general K-content talks.
