Want your beauty brand be more beautiful online? Connect socially or fail.

By Youchin Lin

We just got the newest top 50 beauty brands report last month. Being both a beauty enthusiast and a digital marketing professional, I can’t wait to check their websites to see if there is anything I’ve missed from those giant brands. However, this research process kind of surprised me. Many of the top brands, not all, have an interactive rate lower than 1% on their Facebook fan page, which is not even better than an e-paper open rate. The reason? Apparently, they didn’t show the beauty consumers wish to see online, especially on their social media websites.

This is what I saw most often on a beauty brand’s social media pages, no matter it is Facebook or Pinterest. Beautiful? No, boring.

So, how to make your brand become a real beauty online and increase the interactive rate on your social community? The answer is also simple: connect with your customer socially. Social media community shouldn’t be merely an extension of brand website. You should promote your products on your official website; when it comes to social media, the strategies and contents should be more about relationship and lifestyle because of its social nature.        

Here are some quick tips for you to drive engagement within your social community and outmatch your competitors.

1) Use Pinterest to understand your target customers. Go to Pinterest. Not just ask your customers to repin your products, but also take some time to see what they are actually doing there. They will show you what they really care about and what the ideal beauty is for them. You will find out that beauty is a relatively broad concept for them, and they want to be beautiful inside out and outside in. They want their whole life be beautiful. Once you have the consumer insight, you will know the key is to create a community representing beauty, not a beauty product community. Use those insights to build your community and make it relevant to your customers.

2)  Provide beauty solution, not beauty product. You should know there are 1,851,000 status updates per 20 minutes on Facebook, which means your customers won’t spend too much time on your updates if you can’t provide a quick solution for them.  Don’t write a lot of sentences or just put a product picture, they won’t read it. Give them hints which can inspire their ideas about how to become more attractive with your products.

3) Keep being relevant. Yes, sometimes it is hard to find a right topic all the time, but this is so critical in running a social community. Try alltop.com to find out the hot topics in different categories, and be more creative about the keywords you use. This will help you feed your community with more relevant and abundant ideas consistently.  

Youchin Lin is a graduate student in the Northwestern Medill IMC marketing program and is specializing in digital marketing and retailer marketing. Youchin will be graduating in December 2012. Youchin can be reached on http://www.linkedin.com/in/youchinlin or on twitter using the handle @YouchinLin

(Images from Peep into fashion blog and Natural beauty is best website)