→ The unique community-based approach of these beauty brands 💄
While everyone's focusing only on IG and TikTok, some beauty brands have been doing something else
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When we think of social media, particularly for D2C brands, we think of Instagram and recently, TikTok. Facebook is mostly out of the picture – it’s a dead platform, right?
Wrong. 👀
In the 2019 F8 conference, Facebook acknowledged that they want to put Groups first, and that people may see a lot more content from groups on their feed. They mentioned that more than 400 million people are a part of a group that they find meaningful – this was in 2019.
Since then, they’ve been keeping up on that notion — in 2021, they launched a new set of tools for group admins, in order to make their lives easier. Vogue Business even called FB Groups “Beauty’s Secret Weapon” in a late-2020 article. (I highly recommend you to read it)
“Facebook groups present an organic and unique opportunity to drive a deeper level of engagement,” said Alec Piliafas, social marketing director at 360i. “Pages served the role around pushes specifically. But groups can now serve as engagement.”
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Into The Gloss: The Group 💄
Glossier was quick to get on it. The Into The Gloss Facebook Group was one of the first beauty-focused Facebook Groups – it was launched 3 years ago, and now has more than 21k members. It averages around 2 posts per day, and 50 in the last month.
“Master Threads” – Genius.
According to the post welcoming members, the Into The Gloss group is not sponsored, however, it is moderated by ITG staff, who might ask for users' opinions on beauty tips and trends, and might share ITG articles that are relevant to the group's ongoing dialogue.
As linked in the welcome post, the ITG group has a post with links to other featured posts on specific, most commonly asked topics. Users are encouraged to go through these posts first before asking any questions.
Not always on-brand
What’s cool about this group is that the conversation is not about Glossier products all the time – in fact, it’s not the case most of the time. And this is actually an asset for Glossier – it allows the team to get a very deep understanding of their customers as they are in their natural, non-branded state.
The Master Threads also include “City Guides” – which are beauty-focused (mostly) guides to popular cities around the world, allowing Glossier to understand their customers even from a non-beauty standpoint, to really get where they go, what they do and what they look for even while traveling. Imagine the value of this from a product development and marketing standpoint.
What it means for them
The Into The Gloss group is also a great resource for Glossier to find its most loyal members, and potentially reach out to them for further advice, suggestions and maybe even partnerships.
Even if their objective isn’t to find individual members to reach out to, the group is a collective of Glossier’s most likely ambassadors, and every time they use the group to get or give advice, they’re interacting with the brand in some way, building engagement and loyalty further.
Another function of Facebook Groups that brands love to use is polls — launching a poll is the easiest way to gather direct feedback from your most loyal community. But this can’t be done too often, otherwise it gets tiring for users.
The Good Skin Crowd 👌🏼
After Glossier, Versed Skincare launched their Facebook community 2 years ago, growing it to more than 73k members today, growing at around a 100 members per week, and around 24 posts a day as of writing. It is much more active than Glossier’s group.
While a lot of their user-posted content is the same as Glossier’s, Versed Skincare is taking greater advantage (and being more straightforward) with their community about getting information and insights from them.
They even use the group as a way of collecting feedback from their community about their latest initiatives, which is cool.
Finally, they even use the group as a way of getting users to test their new and latest products — a great way to delight and engage their community even further, while at the same time getting valuable insights into their market.
“We have so much data that we use from our Facebook group, and we use it to inform so much from formulation to imagery and even our tag lines,” says Melanie Bender, president at Versed Skincare. (source)
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What you can do
Social media isn’t a one-way interaction anymore — the most successful brands not only speak to their followers, but have their followers speak to them, and to each other.
Facebook Groups is one way of building this kind of community interaction, but it’s not the only way. Many brands have also started creating communities on Discord – AllSaints is one example, even though their Discord hasn’t picked up in the way they probably intended for it to.
Building a community today is not very hard. The key is maintaining it to be a place that customers feel like they can be themselves, without pushing the brand in their face all the time.
It is for this reason, that it’s important that you don’t kill the hen that lays the golden eggs – don’t push your brand too much in front of group members, posting promotions and advertisements – keep the group as a space where users can talk among each other in a manner that feels natural to them.
Thanks for reading —
If you were to start your own Facebook Group for your brand, what would it be about? How would you go about building and maintaining it? Do you have any questions?
Hit “reply” and let me know — I’d love to hear your thoughts 😄
Cheers,
Mayank from Ubu
Selling Social is brought to you by Ubu.
Love this! Never knew Facebook groups could be such an awesome tool to engage with the brand.