CASE STUDY: Fenty Beauty’s Social Media Strategy

4 min readNov 17, 2020

With over 10M followers on Instagram and 641K on Twitter, I think we can agree that Fenty beauty has their social media strategy on lock. Let’s delve into it and see if all they had to do was rely on Rihanna’s influence.

INSTAGRAM FEED

Their instagram feed is a mix of product shots and User Generated Content. They post 4–10 times daily. While this might be a bit much for other brands, when you consider the fact that Fenty Beauty is a global brand it all begins to make sense to post that frequently. The reason being their customers are in different time zones which means customer A in New York might only see 60% of what you post during the day and customer B in Paris might only see 70%. It helps to stay top of mind with their customers regardless of time zone.

POWER OF RIHANNA

By leveraging on Rihanna‘s star power, they have direct access to her 87 million followers, most of whom are beauty lovers and loyal fans that will support whatever she puts out.

She constantly posts about the beauty brand to her followers through engaging video content and pictures when she makes use of the product. The only link on her bio also directly leads to the Fenty Beauty website. Does this mean Rihanna has a favorite amongst her businesses? 🤔

BRANDED HASHTAGS

#Fentyface & #Fentybeauty

These hashtags have 145k and 4.5M posts respectively. The brand encourages its customers to make use of the hashtags to post their content when they make use of Fenty Beauty products. This makes it easier to track User Generated Content and helps to build a beauty community of Fenty Beauty users who can also follow the hashtag to see how other consumers are making use of their products.

#fentybeautyuniversity

This hashtag is used to school their followers on how to get the best use of their products. it includes tutorials and beauty tips. It’s mostly targeted at college students.

Product Hashtags

All their products are included in captions as hashtags. This is a great strategy for a brand that offers a lot of products. When a potential or current customer clicks on the hashtag, they are able to see how that specific product looks on different skin tones or how other consumers are using the product. It also helps that Fenty Beauty products have distinctive names.

USP: INCLUSION

When Fenty Beauty launched in 2017, it was named by TIME as one of the best inventions of that year. They revolutionized the makeup business by launching with a 40-shade foundation range. They were solving a problem a lot of women. had which was having to mix 2–3 foundation shades to get their perfect shade. Since then, other makeup brands have widened the shade range of their foundation to cater to more skin tones.

Fenty Beauty still practices inclusion through their social media pages. They are very intentional about posting more than 1 skin tone in every few posts. They also mix their content with influencer posts and everyday people’s posts. This creates an inclusive beauty community where everyone is welcome and if you don’t know how to work your makeup well, they have tutorials to guide you.

BRAND PERSONALITY

Witty, Fun and Trendy

There is a major infusion of Rihanna’s personality into the brand. From their posts to their. captions and comments, You can almost imagine Rihanna being the one typing.

However, not every brand can get away with being sarcastic. According to Sprout Social, 83% of people. prefer brands who are friendly and only 33% prefer snarky.

COLLABORATION

There’s a synergy between all of Rihanna’s brands. Fenty Beauty collaborated with Savage Fenty, Rihanna’s Lingerie brand by being the exclusive makeup brand for their runway show which was promoted on their social media platforms.

Skincare brand, Fenty Skin has also collaborated recently with Fenty Beauty through an Instagram live where both brands discussed all things skin and beauty with Fenty Skin’s Ambassador and Fenty Beauty’s Global Makeup Artist.

We can expect to see more collaborations in the future between her brands .

POP CULTURED

They are well versed in the meme language. They know what internet slangs are trending and tap into it to communicate with their audience. Their posts are also highly relatable to their followers.