Kolsquare undertook a thorough investigation into the factors that affect aesthetics on social media. From January 2020 to February 2021, the platform, which specializes in the optimization of impact marketing strategies, looked at the behavior of hundreds of brands and influencers on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok. With about ten testimony, the quantitative data review was done.

Brands can no longer continue to plan their campaigns without including a critical component: impact promotion, which is critical in the cosmetics industry. Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) have evolved into content producers, as well as free-spirited intermediaries and brand ambassadors. They are more competent, and their expert, impactful profile allows them to crack the mold and offer creativity and freshness. And, as the share of internet purchases and time spent on social media continues to rise, there is no question that this pattern will continue. Meanwhile, social media platforms are rapidly developing technical technologies and systems for products, such as virtual reality, purchase buttons, live shopping, and so on.

Instagram is the social media platform for fashion celebrities. 

According to Kolsquare, the rise in popularity of beauty on social media is due to the industry’s reliance on visuals and experience. 

Beauty digitalization opens the door to technical advancement: Today, you can use your mobile to watch a tutorial or try on lipstick. “Influence marketing rounds out these emerging developments with a true credibility made possible by the confidence relationship between KOLs, users, and brands,” the network members explain.

In reality, picture is by far the most often used medium by cosmetics brands, accounting for 85.9 percent. And there are videos (10.3 percent), Instagram stories (2%), and Instagram videos (IGVT), which account for 1%. 

Instagram, a visual network par excellence, is by (far) the most popular platform for fashion and lifestyle. The statistics are unequivocal: In 2020, 90.4 percent of 1,210,622 beauty-related publications were examined.

Instagram delivers a wide range of formats, with over one million beauty contents counted in 2020. (feed, stories, lives, reels, IGTV). During the first lockdown, there were 800 million concurrent users per day in April 2020. According to Kolsquare, this format lets marketers and influencers maximize their communities’ engagement by providing a space where they can engage in real time. Since the summer of 2020, the use of Reels has also steadily increased. These 15-second videos are very common among brands, particularly when it comes to explaining how to use a product or launching a competition.

It should be noted that 90% of Instagram users follow at least one brand, and 130 million click on a shopping post to learn more about a product per month. 

TikTok has the highest engagement score, at 4.9 percent, led by Instagram (1.07 percent), YouTube (0.5 percent), Facebook (0.15 percent), and Twitter (0.03 percent ).

TikTok is gaining traction among the younger generation, even though it is still a long way from Instagram in terms of viewership. On TikTok, elegance is at the forefront of trends, alongside video games, athletics, apparel, families, and school. According to the most recent TikTok for Business survey, beauty videos will increase by 90 percent in France, 41 percent in Germany, Switzerland, and Austria, and up to 238 percent in Spain by 2020. “ On TikTok, people discuss both elegance and flaws.They value inclusiveness, diversity, and collective assistance. This artistic culture is redefining beauty: they want it to be greener, more transparent, and reflective of diversity. “The most common videos are demos, tips and tricks, and product tests,” say Kolsquare experts.

YouTube, on the other hand, is undeniably the network for makeup tutorials: it is more suited to longer, more comprehensive images.

2021 will be a year of lush, inclusive, and dedicated elegance. 

According to Kolsquare, beauty on social media in 2021 would be ecological, multicultural, and dedicated. Several popular hashtags and influencer profiles are listed by the impact marketing network for the year: 

#skincare – In 2020, a new community of beauty KOLs emerged: skinfluencers – skincare fans. This community is completed by pharmfluencers, who have influence in the pharmaceutical industry.

#selfcare – The return to naturalness is on the rise, with minimalism, no-makeup, and vegan styles all vying for attention. These patterns actually rose in 2020, with limited, or even no, makeup and less rituals: a phenomenon known as skip-care. Green labels such as Lush, Origins, and Typology thrived.

#filter – Augmented and augmented reality are becoming increasingly common in the beauty industry. They allow users to explicitly test makeup or accessories. With the outbreak of the sanitary crisis, this experimental device has thrived.

Affiliation is an important factor to consider. 

Since it is both efficient and convenient, influencer remuneration based on sales generated by a commission determined through a tracking system (affiliate connect, url tracker, promotional code, dedicated Amazon e-shop) is extremely common in the beauty field. However, it must be built on shared confidence in order to satisfy both advertisers and influencers.

Data’s Influence 

The biggest challenge for marketers, though, is finding the most important influencers. Kolsquare offers its own approach based on data aggregation and interpretation, which targets influencers based on their audience, commitment levels, number of followers, topics they deal with, or even the brands they collaborate with. “Big Data and machine learning help target specific influencers, learn about their goals, and reliably calculate the ROI of a given campaign,” the app experts explain.

Finally, Kolsquare stresses that KOLs’ imagination, which continues to be reflected in different ways, is an added benefit and a competitive advantage for brands. However, since credibility is more important than ever in influence marketing, randomly approaching influencers without taking the time to get to know them and target them is no longer effective.

When customers want more honesty and credibility from advertisers, it is more important than ever for brands to engage with their ambassadors: they stand to learn a lot by properly targeting their influencers and ensuring complicity with them.