Engaging customers beyond captions & retouched images – Beauty brands pioneering the game.

In an era wherein retouched images and nicely crafted captions rule the world of engagement in social media.

There is an emerging trend toward the love for long-form content, mainly crowd-sourced to engage social media following and build a community of brand enthusiasts.

Gen Z may be known for their love of short video content, but brands are finding that long-form stories are still a way to reach them.?

Maybelline, E.l.f. Beauty and Clean & Clear are among the brands in the beauty and personal care spaces that have recently hosted campaigns on Wattpad, a platform where users write and share stories ranging from personal accounts to fan fiction.?

80% of Wattpad’s 94 million users are Gen Z, according to the platform. U.S.-based users make up 20% of the total.?

With 84% of users identifying as female, beauty brands have begun to tap into the audience.?

“Wattpad dispels the myth that Gen Z has a short attention span and [that they] operate on this weird superficial level.”?

Maybelline "write-a-thon" campaign:

Maybelline led #BraveTogether Wattpad “write-a-thon” campaign, asking users to submit stories based on a series of four writing prompts released each week.?

When users added the campaign hashtag to their submitted stories over the course of May, $1 was donated to charity per story submitted.

The campaign received over 84 million impressions and 37,000 story submissions for its first iteration.

ELF Beauty:

E.l.f. Beauty’s June 2021 #EyesLipsFierce campaign on Wattpad, meanwhile, received 10,000 entries following a prompt for users to talk about a woman in their life who is fierce.

The campaign resulted in 45 million media impressions and 182,000 reads of tagged stories.

The platform works directly with brands to create writing prompts on the platform.

Wattpad leverages a lot of data to serve the right stories to the right person at the right time.?

Wattpad has emerged as a platform to see the reality in terms of stories that exist behind real social media.

Wattpad is just a mirror to what’s happening in society and when people want to deeply engage.

As authenticity and rawness become essential for marketing to Gen Z, platforms like Wattpad ensure to reach them beyond hyper-curated, polished social media posts.

Authenticity is more than just a picture on a caption, it’s the real side of social media.

As an author of two books, I firmly believe, that each one of us has a story to narrate and platforms like Wattpad are just doing that i.e. narrating authentic stories to its users who tend to engage with the platform as we all have grown up listening to stories from our grandparents.?

?Are you crafting your story to narrate to the world? If yes, then please feel free to comment and share it in the comment section.

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