case study: unleash the power of selfies for your brand
DESCRIPTION
Did you know that on average a photo that contains a face receives 38% more likes? Ever wondered why faces are so engaging compared to other types of photograph? Discover why and how your brand can embrace this trend to engage with its audience better and build brand awareness on Instagram. All of this and even more is explained in our new Case StudyTRANSCRIPT
Unleash the power of selfies for your brand
unleash the power of selfies for your brand
More than ever photos are becoming the major means of communication online. With photo and video sharing networks such as Instagram people are now able to communicate easily with large groups of people or friends through images, easier than using words alone. Whether they choose to share a photo of their cat or a selfie, users are no longer using photographs in the way we used to. Photographs are now a way for self-expression rather than a way to capture souvenirs. As Robin Kelsey explains "We are moving away from photography as a way of recording and storing the past, and instead turning photography into a social medium in its own right"(1)
Therefore as marketing professionals the right questions to ask ourselves are: what types of photograph do these people share online? What type of content do they engage with? And how can we turn this behavior into an opportunity to promote our brands and engage our audiences better?
(1) Kelsey, R. E., and Stimson, B. The meaning of photography. Clark Art Institute, 2008.
Intro
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Selfies rulethe world
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
As stated in a recent study(2) "understanding how photo content might signify engagement, can impact both science and design, influencing production and distribution" but we could also add marketing to the list. If you understand what type of content people like to share and like to see then you can adapt your strategy accordingly. And guess what? One of the most common types of photo shared on social networks like Instagram are photos of people or photos with human faces in them, most of them being known as selfies i.e self portrait photographs.
A quick search on Iconosquare for the hashtag #selfie & #me will give you a good overview of the power of selfies on Instagram. So far the #me hashtag has been used over 250M times, the #selfie hashtag 14M times and this does not include all its declinations such as #selfies (10M), #selfiesunday (9M), #selfienation (2M), etc. This is huge! Especially if you consider that selfies now account for 30 per cent of pictures taken by those aged 18-24.
(2) Faces Engage Us: Photos with Faces Attract More Likes and Comments on Instagram. Bakhshi, Shamma & Gilbert.
Selfies have become so popular and so trendy that the Chainsmokers- a music group - recently paid tribute to them with a song entitled #SELFIES.
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#SELFIES (Official Music Video) - The Chainsmokers - YouTubewww.youtube.com/watch?v=kdemFfbS5H0
unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Selfies rulethe world, really!
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
While some of us might consider this behavior an extension of their self-absorption, others might view it as nothing more than an outlet for self-expression using which just happens to be shared more publicly via the communication mode of our times — social media.
As Dr. Andrea Letamendi, a clinical psychologist and research fellow at UCLA, highlights: "Self captured images allow young adults and teens to express their mood states and share important experiences".(3)
This means that they are more likely to share any positive or negative experience they have, including experiences with your brand and products. Therefore it is essential for your brand to seize this opportunity and turn it to your advantage because photographs with faces in them - be they selfies or not - are more powerful than any other types of photograph.
(3) http://healthland.time.com/2013/09/06/why-selfies-matter/
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
The powerof selfies
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
According to the Georgia Institute of Technology and Yahoo Labs researchers that examined 1.1 million photos on Instagram, pictures featuring human faces generate the biggest positive response from users.
They found out that on average a photo that contains a face receives 38% more likes and 32% more comments compared to a photo that does not contain any faces. They also found that the number of faces in the photo, their age and their gender do not impact engagement.
Ellen DeGeneres’ Oscar Selfie beat all records. This selfie has been seen by 37 million people worldwide on Twitter and received 1.38M likes on Instagram. It has been valued between 800 million and 1 billion by M. Levy CEO of the Paris-based global advertising and marketing behemoth, handles international marketing for Samsung.
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
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A great non-profit example of the power of selfies has been the No Make-Up Selfie for Cancer Awareness campaign in March 2014. This campaign was not launched by Cancer Research UK but it grew organically, making a huge impact on social media and getting attention in national newspapers and on radio and TV news.
The #nomakeupselfie started trending as women posted pictures of themselves without make-up on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram resulting in £2M raised in only a few days.
Why are faces so engaging compared to any other types of photograph? First of all because the human brain has evolved to recognize faces within hours after birth(4) and has a specific region that is specialized for facial recognition. Then because faces are important for social cognition as well, not only because we are able to recognize them earlier than other objects, but also because they display our feelings about past, current and future events through expressions.(5)
That said it is easy to understand why human faces play an important role in improving consumer responses to advertisements and why, as a brand, you should try to stimulate this type of content when engaging your community.
(4) Johnson, M. H., Dziurawiec, S., Ellis, H., and Morton, J. Newborns’ preferential tracking of face-like stimuli and its subsequent decline. cognition 40, 1 (1991), 1–19.
(5) Darwin, C. The expression of the emotions in man and animals. Oxford University Press, 1998.
unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Mastering the power of selfies
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Now that we’ve analyzed the domination and the power of photographs with human faces in them better - more particularly selfies - it’s time to see how you can benefit from this to engage with your audience better and build brand awareness on Instagram.
Why is it so important? Because when a user decides to associate their face with your brand or your product it is a great signal for their community. It’s a way for them to show their community that they have had a great (or bad) experience with your brand/product. This can be considered as a visual and social recommendation and your brand needs that. It’s for these reasons you not only need to stimulate user-generated content but you also need to motivate people to associate their faces with your product / brand.
How can this be done? Here are some great examples we’ve come across including some specific campaigns that have been run using Iconosquare’s contest toolkit. Not only because our toolkit is awesome but also because we’ve noticed that selfie contests are the most likely to get more entries, participants and overall reach. All of these are great case studies, you should be inspired to master the power of selfies for your brand.
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Zappos #nextootd
Never heard about the hashtag #ootd? The Outfit of the day hashtag has been used over 30M times on Instagram. Everyday thousands of people share their outfit with the rest of the world to collect likes and feedback. Based on this observation Zappos decided to launch their own hashtag #nextootd to provide users with personal recommendations. How? Instagram users only have to upload a selfie of their outfit with the #nextootd hashtag and a stylist from Zappos will take a close look at their Instagram account, at what they wear, their friends’ style, the places they go and make personal recommendations. Awesome!
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Nuxe Paris #selfieprodigieux
During the spring, NUXE Paris ran a campaign in France to promote its wondeful oil - Huile Prodigieuse. To enter, participants (mostly women) had to upload a photo of themselves with their Huile Prodigieuse. This was a nice opportunity for Nuxe to show their product in situ and to associate it with human faces. Another interesting point with this contest was the fact that despite this was aimed to France only, faces have no borders, no languages and anyone on Instagram who sees one of the entries in his feed can feel concerned.
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Pizza Hut #BBQWithBlake
Pizza Hut has partnered with Blake Shelton to launch a line of barbeque pizzas teased by mobile activation, enabling fans to submit a selfie with an in-store life-sized cutout of the country music star which it is calling a "Shelfie." Fans may post and share "Shelfies" socially with the hashtag #BBQWithBlake to win free pizzas and prizes.Pizza Hut made a great job associating a celebrity advocate like Blake Shelton with a trendy phenomenon like selfies. "The 'Shelfie' program allows them to be part of that relationship in their own way via their personal social channels, and the content is very sharable." said Courtney Moscovic, a Pizza Hut spokeswoman.
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Turkish Airlines #SelfieShootout
Turkish Airlines collaborated with NBA champion Kobe Bryant and international soccer star Lionel Messi as the faces of a #SelfieShootout contest in December 2013, in which fans could upload selfies for a chance to win a free flight. The campaign became one of the travel industry’s most viral campaigns of the past year.
The Youtube video of the #SelfieShootout has been viewed over 138M times
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Kobe vs. Messi: The Selfie Shootout - YouTubewww.youtube.com/watch?v=jhFqSlvbKAM
unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Hansgrohe USA #WaterSelfies
Another interesting campaign from Hansgrohe USA, inviting participants to upload selfies but … underwater. A very innovative contest that matches perfectly the core business of the company while using the power of selfies to gain exposure. The quality of some pictures is just amazing.
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Friskis&Svettis, turning selfies into ads
People love taking selfies, and they like to show their friends that they are working out so they take selfies in the mirror at the gym. Friskis&Svettis, the largest sports organization in Sweden, decided to use this behavior to turn those photos into small ads. How? They made a clearprint for every one of the 14 Friskis&Svettis gyms in Stockholm and printed them on 2,700 tee-shirts. But…they mirrored the print!
They sent tee-shirts to the most active members to get the bus on, and a week later they started giving them away in the gyms for … a selfie! All members had to do to get the tee-shirt was taking a selfie with the tee-shirt on while working out and post it with the most popular gym training hashtags in Sweden. The word spread fast and the tee-shirts sold out in 3 days generating hundreds of pictures with the « I love Friskis&Svettis » on it, not only in the users' feed but also in the most popular training feeds on Instagram.
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
Share a Coke #SelfieSweeps
Coca Cola give its consumers a chance to win their concert tickets for the summer.By being 1 of 500 selfies they can unlock access to the biggest musical events of the year. Plus, every day the first 10 to post on Twitter or Instagram will get a month of Spotify Premium.
A great idea to increase the brand exposure and expand the Coke experience on Instagram and Twitter. Thirsty?
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unleash the power of selfies for your brand
We’ve seen a couple of great case studies in this document and now you might have some great ideas popping up. Regardless of your budget try to think of how you could explore the realm of selfies for your own brand and how you could engage with your audience. Of course you might not be Turkish Airlines or Pizza Hut to partner with top celebrities but you can do great things with creativity, the Friskis&Svettis campaign is probably the best example.
Now it isyour turn
Are you ready to unleash the power of selfies for your own brand?We are here to help, so contact us
NATALIE JARRAUDSales Manager
ROMAIN OUzEAUMarketing & PR Manager
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ARNAUD chAPOUxSales Manager
unleash the power of selfies for your brand
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