project two
@riotswim | 2020
Black woman-owned luxury swimwear company
Following: 166k on Instagram
Audience: Millennial women, with a simple yet upscale aesthetic, lovers of travel, luxurious experiences, and high quality basics
Areas of Influence: in-feed curation, community management, copy, newsletters
PROBLEM
Low engagement due to Instagram algorithm changes following the launch of Reels
SOLUTION
Incentivize customers to interact more frequently with our content and ultimately share their content to supplement our Reels
Riot Swim (@riotswim) had roughly 166k followers when I arrived. While the followers remained constant throughout my tenure, we saw a marked increase in engagement. With the pandemic still in swing, we had the challenge of promoting swimwear when people were not really going on vacation. My strategy was to get people invested in the brand and not just the product.
We promoted the hashtags #RiotBabe and #RelaxItsJustAss to incentivize customers to post and tag us in their photos wearing Riot Swim bikinis, expanding our content bank to include the best quality customer photos in our feed. We also utilized and reposted Reels and TikToks from customers to supplement our video content.
pictured: examples of copy, content, and responses for @RiotSwim
To incentivize customers to tag us, we regularly reposted our tagged photos, Stories, and Reels, on our Stories, with a twice-weekly “This Week’s Riot Babes” vertical. Beyond encouraging product photos, we also expanded our use of Instagram Stories, posting questions like “Drop an emoji that fits your Monday mood” and “We don’t know about you Riot Babes, but we’d rather be on a beach in our #RiotSwim. Where’s your dream vacation spot?”.
We then would post several of the responses, increasing engagement with our Stories, as well as giving us valuable insights into who and how frequently people are interacting with our content. We also found that on days that we were consistent with our Stories, our in-feed content performed much better and our overall reach improved as well.
pictured: Instagram Stories created for Riot Swim
With the introduction of Reels, we saw a sharp decline in engagement overall, but made the quick pivot to including video content on our feed, first using the high quality video content from shoots. But as we have seen with TikTok, there is a fine balance between content that is good quality without being overproduced. We found that behind the scenes content from shoots, quick videos of our styles, and influencer and customer created reposts performed much better than some of the more produced video content we posted.
People want to feel like they can connect to the brand, so we focused on creating an experience that is relatable with a healthy dose of aspirational content like vacation photos and luxurious filler content, often times the vacation photos of our customers- further reinforcing the association that the aspirational life is not too distant from our potential customers.
With these strategies in place, we found that we were receiving consistently higher likes, frequent comments, and we found that there was a core group of dedicated customers who regularly interacted with our content, and it was expanding. By creating a culture that made our customers stakeholders in our business and invested not only in our product but in our brand identity, we saw a 200% increase in story and in-feed engagement, and increased traffic to the website and newsletter subscription from social.