Dove promotes positive tweeting through #SpeakBeautiful campaign
Unilever?s Dove, known for its ongoing efforts to promote inner beauty, is teaming with Twitter to encourage women to speak positively of themselves, following a study that Twitter performed that found women are 50 percent more likely to make negative comments about themselves around the Oscars than the rest of the year.
To boost awareness for this effort, Dove is using Promoted Tweets that include a video and the hashtag #SpeakBeautiful. Its constant efforts to highlight women and promote natural feminine beauty help the brand gain allies and appreciation.
?Dove understands that much of our personal body image is formed through social media,? said Shuli Lowy, marketing director of mobile at Ping Mobile, New York. ?Consumers look to social followings to validate their body image.
?There are numerous tools used to manipulate images so that consumers feel more comfortable with how their bodies look,? she said. ?Unfortunately, a lot of bullying and negative critiquing occurs through social media as well.
?While many associate social media bullying as something that pertains to celebrities, it?s actually a lot more prevalent than that. The easy access consumers have to post negative comments without boundaries can make social media spheres more susceptible to bullying. This is particularly harmful to children who often suffer bullying via social media where there's less likely to be a parent or teacher around to stop it.?
Growing with social
Dove?s Promoted Tweets can be found on Twitter, which include a video that can also be found on YouTube.
The video shows a dominos dice line of what appears to be bars of soap. On the bars of soap, there are captions of tweet written on each one that proclaim negativity about the writers? bodies.
Dove explains that all of the negativity that can be found on social media can be stopped with one tweet, prompting the brand to take that initiative. The video then explains that Dove is partnering with Twitter to promote positive tweeting.
Dove?s positive tweet, which arrives in the video as a domino dice of a different color, hits the negative die and continues to knock all of them down.
The video also shares a statistic that states, ?Last year women sent more than five million negative tweets about beauty and body image.? Lastly, Dove introduces the hashtag #SpeakBeautiful and says, ?Let?s change the way we talk about beauty on social media.?
Together, Dove and Twitter are partnering to prompt a social change.
?The majority of social media usage occurs through mobile devices, making mobile an important focus for Dove,? Ms. Lowy said. ?The brand has created several short form videos that have gone viral.
?Short form videos are specifically well suited for mobile engagement,? she said. ?The brand has also coupled its social campaigns with mobile ad buys to push the movement along.
?We should all put our efforts towards Dove's mission and work to make the social web a place where we #SpeakBeautiful about others.?
Social pros
Dove is a brand known for its ability to engage followers on social media.
Along with retailer Kohl?s, Dove landed at the top of social media relationship platform Hootsuite?s monthly Love List acknowledging the brands that saw the most love on social media in October 2014.
The Love List ranks more than 450 top worldwide brands and uses data from Hootsuite?s social monitoring, listening and advanced analytics system to sort through hundreds of millions of social media posts. October?s list also includes Friskies, Avon, The CW and TripAdvisor in its top ten (see story).
Last summer, Dove extended the reach of its ongoing ?Campaign for Real Beauty? via a partnership with digital greeting card company Open Me to land an emotional plea around friendship for a female audience.
Seeking to re-engage the audience in the debate over the definition of beauty, Dove?s ?Beauty is? native ads on mobile prompted women to create and send an e-card to a friend in celebration of things that are beautiful aside from physicality. The campaign tied in nicely with how Facebook is already used to express support and kudos for friends (see story).
?The fact is that we all have tremendous power with our voice on the social Web,? Ms. Lowy said. ?That power can be used to crush others self esteem or to lift them up and encourage them.
?Dove understands that social media is the playground where this voice is exchanged,? she said. ?The brand therefore strategically chose to partner with Twitter to work on its #SpeakBeautiful campaign.
?Dove has been known for leveraging social media to fuel social change.?
Final Take
Caitlyn Bohannon is an editorial assistant on Mobile Marketer, New York