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How to Perform on Social Media: A Content Deep Dive with Allure

Kelsey Skinner
December 16, 2019
Last Updated On

The Dash Hudson family of brands is made up of some of the savviest social marketers in the industry. We’re constantly learning and evolving our product, based on the incredible insights that we gain from our community. So we thought, why not bring these brilliant minds together to geek out over all-things social marketing?

Women standing up speaking at Savvy press conference
Savvy's hosts FLR: Juliette Dallas-Feeney and Rachel Jo Silver from Love Stories TV.

In October, we hosted the first Savvy: Visual Marketing Summit—a one-day summit to do just that. Marketing professionals gathered in SoHo, New York for a day of programming and workshops delivered by social marketing savants and industry experts, on topics falling under the categories of engagement, growth, and creativity.

One of our long-time friends Danielle Odiamar, Associate Director of Social Media at Allure, hosted a workshop covering content deep dives on social—and we’re here to share her guru-like insights.

Before we get down to social media business, here’s a little about Allure:

Allure is the beauty expert—an insider’s guide to a woman’s total image. Allure’s mission is to investigate and celebrate beauty and fashion with objectivity and candor, and to examine appearance in a larger cultural context. Through its journalistic approach and high aesthetic standards, Allure delivers content with credentials, which yields unwavering consumer trust.

At Allure, social media is an open-ended opportunity to be a thought-leader in the beauty industry from all angles, and redefine beauty norms. In terms of business goals on social, Allure’s main areas of focus include brand growth, audience engagement, and content development. At Savvy, Danielle shared how the social team performs content deep dives to gain a better understanding of what content is performing and what isn’t—with the help of Dash Hudson, of course.

“As the social media lead on the team, it's really important for me to utilize Dash Hudson's tools to deeply understand all of the content we're producing and sharing to figure out what's performing best and how we can better prioritize our content.” — Danielle Odiamar, Associate Director of Social Media at Allure
FLR: Danielle Odiamar, Associate Director of Social Media at Allure, speaking with Marie La France, Executive Director of Corporate Strategy at Dash Hudson.

Allure's Monthly Content Deep Dives

Each month at Allure, their editorial teams come together to perform a content deep dive on their most important marketing channel, Instagram. This allows the editors to take a step back to understand, out of the content they published that month, which photos and videos actually resonated with their audience. This can be difficult to do on social because there are so many competing priorities and specific reasons for posting each photo and video.

Dash Hudson Boards

With Dash Hudson’s Boards feature, the Allure team is able to segment and organize different types of content to get a more granular look into each unique category. For example, content featuring nails would be segmented into its own board, portrait shots of influencers or individuals would have its own board, and so on. Boards allow Allure to zone in on any type of content to inform their content curation moving forward, as well as dive into past tentpoles. For Allure, one of their most important traditional content pillars is their Best of Beauty magazine issued every fall. Because this is one of the brand’s most crucial times of the year, it’s important for them to remember to look back on what was done in previous years on social to see how different styles of content performed with their audience.

On the resources side of social, Boards come in handy when teams need to breakdown what needs to be focused on next—especially when needing to build a case around a certain content pillar. Boards will give you the data to back new ideas and help test new areas that a brand is looking to tap into. The Allure team spends countless hours using Boards to understand what they’re doing right and what they can improve on so that the brand is ready to pivot at any time. Instagram is ever-changing, so it’s important to reassess what you’re doing in order to stay ahead of the game.

Dash Hudson’s content segmentation tool for Instagram Stories Story Boards allows Allure to explore new territories such as diversity and body positivity with a goal to redefine beauty norms. Boards have helped the brand define what they are trying to accomplish and understand Stories’ role in its social strategy.

“Boards is an eye-opener in terms of how you can evaluate your content because you start to think about things beyond your immediate engagement metrics such as likes and comments.” — Danielle Odiamar, Associate Director of Social Media at Allure

The Metrics Allure Cares About

Long story short: Engagement isn’t the end-all-be-all. With so many insights in one software solution, it makes it easier to look at individual posts and understand what audiences either liked or disliked about each photo and video.

Just because one post gets more likes than the other, doesn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t worth your while. If a post received fewer likes than another, perhaps the post pushed more traffic to site via LikeShop, or garnered more followers. Check out the other metrics that you should keep in mind when evaluating your content strategy.

  • Effectiveness Rate: Though your engagement rate gives you a better understanding of how your content is resonating with those who already follow you, if a brand is interested in growth, effectiveness rate gives you a more broad view of the entire landscape on Instagram. Measuring success by effectiveness provides a stronger understanding of how a photo or video resonates with users who actually laid eyes on it.
  • LikeShop Clicks are another way for Allure to not only drive traffic to their website but follower growth as well. If a brand is producing content that is a level of quality designed to push someone to the link in bio, chances are that they will also follow the brand.
  • Saves can be such an important metric that isn’t always given due credit. For publishing brands, a lot of the content is evergreen, so there is a constant opportunity to have your audience re-engage with past posts.
  • Stories Reach & Impressions: Where stories only live for 24 hours, the amount that something is seen or how many people have seen it is very important. The more something is seen in a shorter amount of time, the better.
  • Stores Exit Rate: Allure uses Exit Rate as a gauge of engagement within Instagram Stories. If your audience is engaged with a story, they are more likely to watch all the way through, keeping your exit rate low. This helps brands understand if the content published to Stories is strong enough to be resonating with audiences.
  • Swipe-Ups: Similar to Exit Rate, if audiences are engaged with a piece of story content enough to follow the swipe up call-to-action, this is a great indicator of success.

Key Takeaways

  • Take some time to really analyze your content. Knowing what resonates with your audience will help improve your social strategy in the long run, and not only keep your followers engaged—but attract new eyes as well.
  • If you’re a Dash Hudson user, take advantage of Boards! The boards feature makes content segmentation simple. Everyone on your team will have preferences as to what should be published on social, but Boards helps you cut through the noise and share what works.
  • Whether it’s monthly or quarterly, it’s crucial that your team takes time to step back and analyze the content that has been published. Creating and following a content deep dive cadence with your team can help everyone stay on track to achieving goals, and keep your content pillars in check.
  • Know what metrics are most important to you, your brand—and most importantly, your boss. Instagram’s native metrics, and metrics that live within Dash Hudson signal different things depending on what your goals are. Understanding which numbers are relevant to each area of your strategy will help you determine what kind of content to spend more time and resources on.

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