Social Media Content Creation & Management of Wonderful Beef
Since the start of 2021, ShapeWin began content creation and social media management on behalf of our client OPERA, which is an intermediary for the 3-year Wonderful Beef Campaign finance by the
European Union and Provacuno (the Agro-food Inter-professional Organization of the Spanish Beef Industry). Our KPI goal was to increase brand reach, post and video views, and account followers on three social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube). In addition, we were required to hire a Key Opinion Leader (KOL) such as an Instagram influencer per year. In order to successfully achieve our client’s goals in Japan, a number of challenges and roadblocks had to be overcome.
Japan is a very conservative market and can be very suspicious when it comes to new Foreign brands. The first challenge was to make the accounts “Japan friendly”. For this, Mrs. Sugimoto, a social media planner, who had already been successfully running another foreign brand Instagram account, recommended adding titles such as “Official” 【公式】, as well as at least 5 highlights, which is a minimum standard for all official Japanese accounts. From here, we had to produce content that would be appealing to Japanese. Since Wonderful Beef had no official store/products, it made this a bit more of a challenging concept. We tested a few different styles and age demographics, and found that a combination of high quality photos and recipe links were the most effective for engagement. However, the lack of both on the client’s website and need for “propaganda” posts about the European Production Model, etc., made it a challenging task to build an engaged audience. It is also important to not repeat the international page posts, but to create content specifically for Japan, such as incorporating Wonderful Beef into various Japanese holidays.
The huge difference of Japan Follower Phenomenon
Our client was surprised how one of our post advertisements could reach over 180,000 views with over 4,000 engagements(likes and comments), yet the page followers only increased by only 10 accounts. Unlike other countries in Asia, Japan is unique in certain aspects of digital media interaction. This is partially due by Japanese school group/work culture, in which most people spend their final year of college carefully choosing a job, and once they enter a company usually stay with it for life “SEISHAIN”, and many usually stay with a specific hobby from high school “BUKATSU”. As such, any affiliation to a group (or brand) can be dangerous if it is not well known. As such, many Japanese consumers will carefully consider if they want to identify with the brand before following, making it hard for foreign brands to acquire followers. Another example of this phenomenon is how software companies never offer free trials. It is assumed that if you want the product, one should have enough knowledge and brand trust to purchase it in full. So, although our post views/reach KPI target could be easily achieved, gaining followers was going to be a critically difficult task.
There are many online companies that offer “Facebook/Instagram follower service support”. We tested these out with our own TEMPORARY Instagram account, and while on face value we seemed to be gaining actually Japanese followers, a simple demographic check revealed that most were bot accounts from China or other parts of SEA. So, this was not an option for us. Next, we had several internal discussions and consultations with instagram experts. One tried and true way to get engaging followers is to follow similar accounts, comment and like their posts, and hope they follow back. This is a very time consuming process, but it seemed to be the best way to get followers.After we had published a few dozen posts, had reached a couple thousand followers, and could be recognized as an official account, it was time to adjust our follower marketing strategy. From late 2021, we started running “follower campaign” posts on the instagram account, which offered incentives to follow and interact with the posts. Each one of these campaigns acquired approximately 500 new followers, which was a modest success. Meanwhile, on Facebook, we focused the budget to increase “post engagement”, which allowed us to invite those who interacted with the posts to like our page. With every 20,000 JPY spent on this, we acquired approximately 100~200 followers.
Although these methods are expensive and time consuming, one positive aspect for this is that the followers/page likes we did acquire are quite engaged in the Wonderful Beef brand posts. A good way to check the quality of your followers is to make a post and not boost/promote it. Within 48 hours see how many have interacted with it. If you have 20,000 followers but only a handful of likes, odds are that most of our followers are bots.
The rules and platforms have changed
The risk of PR & marketing with social media lies in the ongoing instability of the platform. Even with the most stable social media site, these platforms still run a risk of getting bought out, platforms merging or rebranding, or rapid policy change. What may make sense as an easy KPI target at the start of a contract, may suddenly become completely unreachable, or at least more difficult.This instability was most clearly evident during the October 4th in 2021 outage, when all social services on Meta were shut down for about 6 hours. Thankfully, this didn’t have any long term lasting impacts on our client’s accounts and services, but it goes to show how quickly things can change.The biggest change was the rebranding of Facebook and Instagram into Meta, which has several impacts on the methods of advertising, as well as targeted ads policy.
In addition, it is hard to get used to the ads layout as the format and options keeps changing. From August 2022, Instagram removed almost a million songs allowed for highlight videos, and merged the video section with reels. But the biggest change was the discontinuation of Facebook Ads “Connection Targeting” setting as of April 28th, 2022 (but the service had unofficially stopped as early as January in the form of a glitch). This decision was mostly designed for ethical reasons, to remove certain options like targeting race, gender, belief, sexual orientation, etc. However, discontinuing this section also resulted in the loss of a very important option to exclude new ads to current page followers. This will make future ads more frustrating as now a portion of the post ad reach will go to the same audiences that already like the page or have seen the ads many times.
Different Demographics for different platforms
In Japan, business social media such as LinkedIn is seen more as a tool for recruiters, and is not so popular for B2B marketing. Hence, most Japanese businesses use Facebook for middle- management marketing, which means its demographics are mostly older men. Our insights confirmed this statistic, with the majority of our client’s followers and post interactions by men between 40~70.
On Instagram, the demographics have shifted to the younger generation, with millennials being the most engaging audience, with the majority of followers aged between 25~45. Due to Meta’s new ad policy, our targeted ads cannot be aimed at those under 18, however, if we remove targeting interests and behavior it can reach them. So, for Instagram, if we want high reach it is best to target youth, but don’t expect many followers or post engagement from them. Most Japanese teens have opted for TikTok as the base for social interaction.
Complicated KOL marketing on social media
The minimum guidelines set by our client involved a follower base of at least 200,000 accounts on one of their selected social media platforms, and was required to do 3 posts (two slideshows and one video recipe).
We created a list of about 20 different social media influencers.. Many Japanese influencers are managed by a third party agency, who add much unnecessary paperwork and take additional fees, making the process much more difficult. In Japan, the cost of an influencer is based on the number of their followers, and an influencer with +200k followers will usually cost more than US$10,000 if done through an agency.
Ultimately, we were lucky to contact a self-managed influencer. She is a home cook influencer with the motto “Easy and short recipes for people who are busy with work and housework“. At the time, the influencer had about 400,000 followers on Instagram, as well as medium sized followings on TikTok & Twitter, etc. We explained to her the client’s 3 post requirements, and she agreed to do them within the allocated budget. Most importantly, she was self-managed (no 3rd party negotiations needed). She was very friendly and reasonable to negotiate/work with, which I felt to be a rarity among the other many DIVA personality influencers. A month following the collaboration, she sent us her post statistics. Overall, she reached approximately 832,351 accounts with the client brand collaboration.
Conclusion
The social media landscape is an ever changing environment, even with the most secure social networking site. It is not only important to stay aware of the subtle differences added in each update to the platform, but also to keep your client informed.This is especially important when planning a long term contract with fixed KPI targets. A lot of marketing managers tend to belong to slightly older generations, so what they might think is an important indicator of brand awareness, may already be archaic by modern standards. A good example of this is Facebook’s gradual phasing out of “page likes”, as interference with bot accounts has made these numbers generally meaningless, and instead focuses on target reach and interaction. As such, it is important to keep your client informed of such changes, and discuss the best way to modify long term strategy to achieve branding success. Navigating social media is much like swimming against the tide, if you stop swimming for even a brief moment, you might be swept away.
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