Why The Honest Co. is honestly the best at social media

Co-founded by Jessica Alba in 2011, The Honest Company produces beautiful, stylish non-toxic household products and uses proceeds to support baby development and youth education. The founders describe the brand: "We tried to think of all the qualities we would want in a dream brand – savvy style, sustainability, and extraordinary service & convenience all wrapped in a passion for social goodness, tied with a bow of integrity and sprinkled with a little cheeky fun."

Communicating the many facets of complex brands can be difficult, but Honest executes an impressive social media strategy.

Like any good strategy, Honest begins with owned content. The company's blog, Honestly, is an attractive, engaging mix of health advice, recipes, design and style ideas, and inspirational tips on happily living life.

Each social channel pulls content from the blog, always driving back to the company's website. Content across channels includes inspirational quotes, product features, user generated content, and blog articles.

Honest's interaction with customers on Facebook is impressive. The brand recently improved their dish soap based on customer feedback - it is now more concentrated and less costly. Facebook fans loved the announcement post (700+ likes and 30,000+ views) and took the opportunity to become even more involved with the brand. 

Honest's Facebook strategy says to customers: We're listening. We care. We're in this for you.

The company's Instagram strategy is also notable. For some companies, eliciting user generated content may result in unusable content. Fans are usually not professional photographers, and some posts can damage the company's brand image. Honest, however, encourages great user content. Each Instagram post is visually appealing and showcases products in use. 

What can brand marketers learn from Honest? Let your product's style flow into your communication. Be appealing and engaging. Most of all, interact with your customers. Show them that you're in business for them. 

Using Twitter when catering to tots

While Twitter has arguably declined in popularity in the public mindset in recent years, it remains a strong digital platform. Twitter boasts 288 million monthly active users and 500 million tweets sent per day. In 2014, the percentage of online adults using Twitter increased by a statistically significant amount. Also in 2014, female internet users on Twitter increased to 21%, and users aged 18-49 represented an overwhelming majority of Twitter users. Clearly, adults, particularly females in parenting stages of life, are still using Twitter. How can child product companies utilize the platform to reach their customers?

Twitter offers several content marketing suggestions for brands. Key principles include:

• Use the 80/20 principle. Only 20% of your tweets should be sales messages like promotions. Focus on interacting with followers. It's about what they want to talk about - not what you want to sell. 
• Be personable. An overly formal tone, even for a corporate account, isn't fitting for Twitter. Be sure to use a unique voice and always consider entertainment value. 
• Establish a regular cadence.

Twitter also offers a sample Tweet calendar which should be altered to the size and needs of each company.

• Monday: Promotions
• Tuesday: Behind the scenes
• Wednesday: Helpful tips
• Thursday: Customer spotlight
• Friday: Feature industry experts or news
• Saturday: Community or industry spotlights
• Sunday: Employee spotlight

These general tips are easily applied to a child product company. Following several industry leaders on Twitter, I've complied a few specific tips. 

• Image centric posts are best. I am much more motivated to look at a post with an in-feed image than click on a tiny url.

Toys 'R' Us does a great job providing engaging, visually appealing content.

• If using Twitter for customer service, be sure to disperse entertaining posts amidst your string of answers (apologetic and kind, of course) to customer complaints or questions. You don't want consumers to only associate your brand with negative complaints. 

After considerable scrolling through Fisher-Price complaints, I finally reached a piece of content, published 3 days ago.

• Cadence, cadence, cadence. 

Bright Starts' last tweet was more than a month ago, and there is similar cadence between January and February. However, the company tweeted almost daily during the December holiday season. Yes, the holidays are a time for increased advertising, but Twitter is about regular engagement with followers, not just during a time of increased spending on toys.

Content marketing for family oriented firms

It is an accepted fact - consumers use the Internet to make purchase decisions. If you work in digital media, you are well acquainted with SEO and how to drive it. You've probably been instructed to "Write me a blog post so I can show up in Google." However, consumers are smarter than that. They don't appreciate an empty string of keywords. Instead, they appreciate usable content, or content marketing.

Attached Media published the below infographic in 2012. 

Attached Media, http://visual.ly/traditional-publicity-vs-content-marketing

As shown, traditional media interrupts consumers while content marketing engages consumers through valuable offerings. Valuable offerings may include educational videos and blogs, guides, lifestyle articles, coupons, or whatever else your target market finds interesting. Valuable offerings do NOT include selling messages or an overwhelming, obvious amount of product information.

Family targeted brands like General Mills, Fisher Price, and Play-Doh implement excellent content marketing strategies.

General Mills' tablespoon.com includes recipes for various occasions.

Hasbro's Play-Doh website includes creation ideas and a sharing platform for other Play-Doh users.

Fisher Price's Laugh and Learn includes play tips and webisodes to help babies learn.

The key? Yes, content marketing may improve your SEO and eventually drive purchase decisions. But your foremost priority must be to create genuine value for your target - learn what they care about and show that you care about them.