**UPDATE** Please note all stats and data as well as social media are correct from Jan 2018 to April 2018. Holly has since taken back her social media and made changes.

Face by Holly

Face by Holly is the social media presence I chose to use for the social media campaign. It belongs to a friend of mine, Holly is a qualified Production Arts Hair and Makeup Artist, training at Iver Makeup Academy- Pinewood studios. Holly had already created her brand. Face by Holly had a logo, a banner and a working website. She also had an Instagram account set up and in use, with just over 80 followers.

My Campaign

Holly aspires to work high up in the industry, offering freelance work along the way. Currently has a LinkedIn account and an Instagram up and running, as well as her website where she showcases personal achievements at Pinewood and hair and beauty posts done in her own time.
Holly offers freelance hair and makeup for any occasion, such as weddings, proms, fancy events etc. A range of packages are available for groups and occasions, and as she travels between London and Southampton for training she is flexible in terms of hours and whereabouts.
Holly differs from others as most MUA’s available for similar prices are self-taught. Holly is training at degree level and has worked for No7, MAC and Smashbox. She is trained in all aspects of the industry, including Film, TV, Theatre, Fashion and Event. And can also offer the following skills of: Basic (hair and makeup), SFX, Period Styling (hair and makeup), Airbrushing, Body Painting and Wig Making, Dressing and Styling, Theatre and Fashion (hair and makeup). As well as cutting and colouring male and female hair.
Her website made on Weebly that includes her work and a contact form for further information and to book an appointment. I will stick to her branding which includes a bright coloured logo, basic font and simplistic theme throughout. I want to keep this branding so as a whole it looks seamless but add a few extra assets for the post about the campaign.

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Social Media Accounts

Holly already has her website up and running, she has given me access to that to refine and enhance it. To do so I will keep in mind the brand she has already created. Although what already exists is quite professional and informational it still needs a chatty and informal voice behind it. That way it makes Holly seem friendly therefor giving another reason for a customer to use her services. Her website isn’t getting many views and any traffic is coming from the link in her Instagram bio. I have set up google analytics to be able to track this better and I want to change it and see the website get engagement from all social media as well as people browsing through google.
The Face by Holly Instagram account is doing pretty well. I have been tracking her stats since the beginning of February: her follower and following count, amount of posts, average likes etc.

So far Holly has been posting around about 2 posts a week getting an average of 14 likes. I’ve been monitoring each post individually to see when it spikes. A positive thing is that her followers are going up quicker than her following. And her average likes are going up slowly. I look to post a bit more often, get her average likes up. I want to have doubled her followers, and by the end of the campaign have a smaller following to follower ratio, granted following people are how you gain followers. I will post more about Holly as a freelancer and the work she offers too, to give more insight into the brand. Have an offer running throughout the campaign and a giveaway if reaching a certain amount of followers.
I want to create Holly a Facebook page, keeping her branding, but being able to list her services and prices. The post will be shared from Instagram or posted directly to Facebook. As the target audience changes between the two platforms, it will be worth researching how that affects the engagement and make changes accordingly. My goal is to get the page 100 likes by the end of the campaign. That is quite high for a starting out page but as she already has 100 followers on Instagram I think it puts us in good stead.
I also want to create a Face by Holly twitter account. After doing some research I found quite a few MUA accounts on twitter so I think it will be good to get a wider audience and not just a local one. With Twitter, it is easy to engage with other similar accounts and share their work with retweets and likes for the same in return. Again keep the branding the same and the posts similar but mainly use it as a gateway to the website and other social media for more engagement. I aim to tweet at least three times a week and gain around 75 to 100 followers by the end of the campaign.

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Strategy

Holly has a whole backlog of work that she’s never posted and I will use that for regular posts to the social media. The plan is to use the accounts to plug the other accounts and the website. Apart from on the website and Holly’s LinkedIn, there is nothing to state she offers freelance work, I want to change that and make it more obvious, by posting the work she offers and possibly her availability. From my research what has got MUAs their following is eye makeup posts. I will get Holly to create some of these for posts let me know the products used so I can tag the companies (also getting more engagement) and perhaps even videos of the process. The plan is to go Live beginning of March that gives 6 weeks for the campaign.
My goal stats are as follows:

• Website views: 150
• Instagram: 200 followers
• Facebook: 100 likes
• Twitter: 100 followers

Post times differ in terms of the platform used. With Instagram’s new algorithm lots of posts go unnoticed, I will do my best to stop this by posting at peak times which for Instagram is between 8pm and 11pm this is similar to Twitter. I think it makes sense to keep this the same for Facebook too as that algorithm is harder to understand.
I also researched the most used tags for makeup artist on Instagram and started to put together a list. Some of these are very widely used and you’d need thousands of likes to make it in the top posts, but the combination of them is more likely to get you noticed. Even if we weren’t to use them in the caption but comment so they aren’t as obvious, you still get the traffic without the big paragraph of hashtags on display. Some of these hashtags are also ones that specific accounts and brands use and they repost the ones they like. I’m doubtful that this will happen as Face by Holly is just starting up, but it will be a huge bonus if it did as it will bring in a lot more traffic
The hashtags I found are: #makeup #makeupartist #makeup #makeupblog #makeuptutorial #makeupfinatic1 #wakeupandmakeup #undiscovered_muas #amazingmakeupart #iveracademy #mua #freelance #makeupartistsworldwide #muafollowtrain #editorialmakeup #makeupjunkie
Holly has asked that I do the same for media hair and wigs as its also content she wants to have on her profile. The other thing we need to include is to tag the brands of the products used so it appears on their account. We also will tag Iver Academy in any relating work because getting traffic to them is something that is important to Holly.

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Schedule

After discussing the original plan through with Holly, she didn’t want her prices online as each client differs so needs clients to enquire first. As Holly is a student (non-university) paying her way through her course, she wasn’t in a position to give anything away, we discussed the idea of maybe giving a makeup application for a discounted price but the issue came in that with the vast range of clients Holly gets, from an 18 year old wanting their makeup done for their birthday night out, to prom bridal, to full body paint and theatrical makeup, we couldn’t think of a way that benefitted all types of customers without putting Holly out of pocket.

We also decided we wanted to post more often and I wanted to give Holly the opportunity to post outside of the plan. After all it was her Instagram account I didn’t think it was fair to not let her have any control for 6 weeks. So weekends were for Holly to post away from the plan.
This plan came in really useful as well, due to a personal circumstance I couldn’t get round to posting, the plan meant that Holly knew exactly what to post and when on her own.

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Results

To track my results I will be monitoring the accounts and updating stats weekly.
For Instagram noting the number of posts, followers, following, least likes, most likes and average likes. This is because likes are very important on Instagram the more likes you’re getting further up the algorithm you will be, increasing the amount of people seeing your post.
For Facebook, we are tracking the number of posts, page likes, page views and the reach. Facebook reach is offered as an insight when you have a business page. Reach is the number of people who had any content from your Page or about your Page enter their screen. This is to give an idea of how many people are seeing your content, for example, if you have 100 likes but a reach of only 50, half of your followers aren’t seeing your content. So the aim was to keep this higher at all times.
For Twitter tracking number of tweets, followers, following, interaction (tweets and replies) and messages. Twitter offers better insights for each individual tweet.

I am going to monitor each post individually, and if and how the likes are fluctuating, noting the number of like on that date if they’ve increased, decreased, stayed the same or a new post. This will be the case with Instagram and Facebook, it will be slightly different with Twitter as it has its own insights. These include impressions and engagements. Impressions are how many people have seen the post and engagements are broken down into likes, retweets, detail expands, profile clicks, media clicks and link clicks.

To begin with our social media stats as of the March 6th started as:

• Website views: 3
• Instagram: 94 Followers
• Facebook: 0 likes
• Twitter: 0 followers

And as of March 4th, we ended with:

• Website views: 65
• Instagram: 164 Followers
• Facebook: 73 likes
• Twitter: 34 followers

The project, at first started off slow but amounted to a good social media campaign with an overall increase of all social platforms. I focused mainly on promoting her Instagram over other social platforms because Instagram is where makeup artists receive the most interaction from an audience. Twitter required a lot more work than we expected and we made the mistake of not linking the Instagram and Facebook pages.
We didn’t quite hit our targets. However, I feel our growth rates are very good. The website views increased 2066.7% over the 5 weeks we carried it out the campaign. Instagram following grew by 74.5%, Facebook likes increased by 98.6% (starting from having 1 follower 100% if you include that we started with nothing.) and Twitter grew by 97% (also 100% if you start from 0), but the last 2 growth percentage did start dying down quite quickly.
With Instagram if we kept up that percentage increase were averaging 14 new followers a week this means we would have hit our target amount of followers if we had 2 extra weeks of the campaign.
Overall I think the campaign has been successful, Holly is over the moon with her increase in following and extra clients she gained and is going to continue implementing some of our plan with her Instagram account.

**UPDATE June 2019** Holly reached 200 followers in August 2018, she has since changed her Instagram handle and doesn’t use it as much hasn’t been active since April as she is now super busy working on multiple films and shows and theatre productions, some jobs she received through her social media.

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