How Maybelline Became the Best Performing Beauty Brand on Instagram in Indonesia

This is a guest post from Lion & Lion Indonesia’s Social Analytics Lead, Shamim Fareez.

Instagram is blowing up in Indonesia: Instagram is now only 2^nd to Facebook in popularity with Indonesia’s millennials.  To the delight of brands, ‘exploring online shopping’ is reportedly the most popular activity on Instagram for Indonesians age 16 to 35, even more popular than viewing friends’ accounts.  And for beauty brands, engagements are higher on Instagram than any other channel.  Add these facts together and you can see why beauty brands are so eager to connect with Indonesian consumers through Instagram.

With this in mind, Maybelline Indonesia partnered with Lion & Lion to create a content strategy that would drive engagement and follower growth for the brand locally.  After deploying their newly developed content strategy, the brand experienced great success with an increase of 7x the average engagements per post, and nearly 2x the monthly follower growth rate.  According to Unmetric, the brand is now the best performing beauty brand on Instagram in Indonesia, with 2x higher engagement and monthly follower growth rate than its closest competitors.

Note: Unmetric’s Engagement score is based on the number of Likes & Comments a post receives and is indexed to score between 0 and 1,000. The Number of Engagements is the sum of Likes and Comments.

With the help of Unmetric, we were able to trend spot, test, and optimize content to continually refresh our content strategy through informative insights.  Here are 4 insights we learned from our success.

1. Influencer marketing is integral for Instagram success. Maybelline’s top performing posts consistently featured digital influencers, such as brand ambassadors and local beauty enthusiasts. In fact, according to Unmetric, the brand’s re-gram of Pevita Pearce, ambassador of Maybelline Indonesia, was one of the top engaging Instagram posts of the week in Asia, and one of the most engaging posts by a beauty brand in Indonesia on Instagram in 2016.
2. Lifestyle Insta-friendly content drives engagement. Though outperformed by influencer content, product visuals, if produced in a lifestyle manner, still drive engagement with fans: product-related content ranked as the 2^nd highest performing category in terms of engagement.  Whether brand produced or user-generated content, product focused content consistently garnered high engagement, especially in relation to new product launches.  Newly launched products and best sellers received the highest share of comments, with fans asking questions such as ‘where to buy’ and ‘how much?,’ as well as comments of love and adoration for the product.
3. Local content outperforms global assets.  Content featuring local faces and local product favorites perform higher than adapted global assets.  This trend extends to local ambassadors and global celebrities, with local influencers outperforming global ambassadors with more than 2x the average engagements per post.
4. Video consistently underperforms.  Similar to L2’s findings, video lags behind photos in terms of engagement.  Like photos, higher performers in the video category include influencer content and product focus.  A surprising high performer was a re-purposed TV commercial that announced the launch of a new lip product, which goes against a larger global trend of poor performance by re-purposed TV commercials on Instagram.  This may indicate pre-existing buzz for the product prior to launch, as it had already launched in markets such as the U.S. and was met with excitement by fans when it’s arrival was announced on Instagram.

To read how we use Unmetric to uncover content insights, check out our case study with Maybelline Indonesia here.