All About #Real Beauty — Dove
Dove is a personal care brand under Unilever started in 1957. The brand mainly focuses on “Purity, Moisture, Cleanliness, Natural Beauty and Touchable Skin”. Inspired by the concept of “Real Women”, Dove launched the Real Beauty campaign more than a decade ago. Its mission is to create “a world where all women feel confident in their beauty.” Dove is considered as one of the leading personal care brands because of its creative Social Media Marketing strategies.
People today want to get more engaged in a brand. They are not only caring about physical products but are also paying more attention to online reviews and social media events of a brand. Dove has taken to several different social media platforms that young women are usually exposed to to build conversations with its target customers.
Dove has more than 27 million likes and also 27 million followers on Facebook, which is very impressive. The brand mainly posts videos about its Real Beauty campaign. And customer engagement level is good since every post can get about 6k likes as well as hundreds of comments and shares. Dove has also celebrated some brand events on Facebook to interact with customers. For example, it created #RaiseTheBeautyBar introducing the limited edition soap to celebrate its 60 years anniversary. Dove also provides shop functions on Facebook by providing their e-commerce website link. However, it only posts about twice a month. It would be better if Dove increases post frequency to enhance impressions with customers.
Dove has about 20 million followers on Instagram, way more than its competitors. The brand mainly posts photos of products and uses #RealBeauty to tell the stories of its female customers. And they post about once a day, much more frequently than they do on Facebook. However, the customer engagement seems lower. Every post gets about a few thousands or even hundreds of likes and only dozens of comments.Their page looks gorgeous because of the consistent style and high quality of the photos. But I think photos are much less attractive and memorable than videos. Additionally, Dove is supposed to work more on customer-generated contents, or in other words, let customers decide what to post on Instagram.
Dove is much more active on Twitter. They have about 19.3 million Twitter followers. Dove keeps a very consistent timeline regarding to their tweet contents. Every tweet is related to the current campaign mainly in the form of texts and videos. Recently, they’ve been focusing on the Real Beauty campaign. Almost every tweet uses #RealBeauty and it’s more interactive with the spokesperson in its latest commercial. Dove also deals with some negative voices on Twitter and offers solutions by directing customers to customer service. The engagement level is higher than its competitors.
Since many of the Pinterest users are young mothers, Pinterest should be a good platform for Dove to reach its target customers. Dove has 7.6 thousand followers on Pinterest. They pin both their own content and others’ including some inspirational quotes to advice. They’re trying to use Pinterest to establish their positive brand image. And based on the pin boards, it seems that Dove is building a community for its followers, not only talking about products, but also sharing life style and experiences.
- YouTube
Many of us have already seen some of the viral videos post by Dove. They have more than 94 thousands subscribers and post videos including some how-to videos, product reviews and commercials. What’s mentioning here is that the videos Dove posts on YouTube is mainly their campaign-focused videos. For example, last year, the videos are mostly about #MyBeautyMySay. Most recently, they launched the video with the theme of #RealBeauty. Dove Real Beauty Productions release the first film featuring the story of Cathleen Meredith. The film tells Cathleen’s story of how she realizes her beauty through dance. And she started “Fat Girls Dance” group to redefine #RealBeauty and deliver positive message with women everywhere.The video has achieved 4.6 millions views and got 1,742 likes as well as 445 comments.
Dove is on the right track of social media marketing. And maybe its next step should be better integrate different platforms to create a consistent a digital ecosystem.
