Rationale

I chose to create a social media strategy for my mom Nicole because she is new to the Nerium brand and isn’t as savvy as other brand partners and competitors on social media platforms. The strategy is generated for implementation on Facebook and is meant to build her personal brand as a user and advocate for Nerium’s skincare and wellness products.

I chose to create the strategy as a personal brand and not a business/professional brand because the overarching company mission and values align with realness and uniqueness. Since one of Nicole’s personal goals is to gain more preferred customers and increase her number of orders each month, it is important not to sound too salesy. The main persona of the brand is to be genuine and true to yourself and your products. By telling and sharing your experiences with the products, others can see why you have had the results you did. As consumers, we don’t necessarily like to feel like we are being sold on something, but we are open to be persuaded in discrete ways. This is referred to as personal selling. By creating posts that demonstrated real results, mixed in with non-related content to keep up the personal-ness of the account, others can see for themselves and make the first action. You create an outlet for potential customers on social media so that they can feel comfortable asking questions about your personal experiences and not necessarily just about the company/business figure who wants to sell their products for a profit.

Nerium is not just a brand, but a community of positivity and love for skincare and wellness. They belong to a virtual community over Facebook, a place where they exhibit deindividuation and reciprocity (Humphreys 170-172). It is common for brand partners to share and recycle content between each other’s accounts. I think it is important to create a new and unique persona that belongs to this community. In other words, my strategy involves creating new and original content with personal, and not entirely recycled text. This is important to set Nicole’s personal brand away from others. If the same content is used repeatedly across brand partners, the information starts to lose validity and the brand being portrayed is not personal and unique to Nicole. Being original is the best way to be yourself. This is not to say that all posts should be completely new in terms of photography. It is safe to use the same photos and company material repeatedly because it shows the community of the brand.