Want to ace your celebrity social media content partnerships? It’s not just about matching the right personalities with your brand.
The opportunity to enlist a community of high-level brand ambassadors and influencers to develop social content can be a boon to brands across industries looking to drive more consumer awareness, connection and engagement. Beyond the growing cadre of popular micro-influencers and macro-influencers, sit the original, influential social media stars: the celebrities.
People want a glimpse into the lives of people they admire. This is true whether it’s a sneak peek behind the scenes of their latest project or a look at their daily practice routine. Social media has provided a forum for these snapshots, along with more direct communication. In this way, teaming up with a well-known person on social media can spotlight and humanize your brand by association.
However, it can be challenging to develop a strong creative relationship with a notable person who is in-demand, build robust, authentic and timely social content with them, and maximize a partnership that may include numerous requests for their time and talents.
Many top brands have figured out how to be successful with celebrity social media content today:
Employ easy-to-use technology that enables brands to communicate and collaborate with celebrity ambassadors directly and on-the-go.
Let’s explore how to build and activate powerful celebrity content connections, and through technology, elevate and streamline their social media content for your brand.
The Foundation for Celebrity Content Success
There are several core questions to ask when you’re thinking about working with a famous personality to develop social media content, to ensure the best foundation for your partnership moving forward. In-depth consideration is critical, whether the particular person is an athlete, entertainment talent or other well-known figure.
- Fit – Do their personality, reputation, values and content style align organically with your brand and resonate with your audience? Are those attributes consistent across all markets and regions you are targeting?
- Endorsement history – Do they have other current or previous successful brand endorsement deals with social media components? Are those deals with competitive or similar brands?
- Passion – Do they have an authentic connection and sincere personal interest in your brand? Are they willing to share their knowledge, experience and enthusiasm about it?
- Social presence – Do they have a strong following and share of voice among your target audience, across the social channels where your audience is spending time? Are they working to grow and engage their social network and expand their own brand?
- Accessibility – Do they have any obstacles in creating or sharing content when you need it, and do they work with others in producing or managing their social account content? Are they open to engaging with your audience in a meaningful way?
In a recent Celebrity Intelligence survey, the top factors that U.K. and U.S. marketing specialists find most useful when identifying celebrities or influencers for collaboration include demographic and psychographic information about their audience or followers (59 percent), along with the talent’s personal interests and values (53 percent). In addition, 33 percent of respondents noted that it’s critical for a celebrity to have a high level of engagement on social media with the right audience to consider working with them.
Best Practices for Celebrity Social Media Content
Once you have identified and chosen your ideal celebrity partner, here are three best practices to follow in working with them to build timely, compelling content:
Give them the tools to develop content quickly. Make it easy for them to share or create authentic content aligned with your brand, wherever they are. A fast response is critical for celebrity social media success, whether the person you’re working with is recording a live moment on the red carpet, showcasing their teammates’ reactions after a big win on the road or sampling your new product at home. Educate them and keep them updated on your brand story, answer questions promptly, and provide clear feedback on what they contribute. Include their talent management team in this process as warranted.
Prioritize mobile to streamline collaboration. Improve efficiencies to fit their active lives. Many luminaries have busy lifestyles with numerous requests for their time, substantial travel commitments and unconventional schedules. They may have limited availability to record and upload videos to their social accounts and respond to messages. Centralizing all of these activities on mobile helps to make requests as flexible and turn-key as possible.
Check your performance data to optimize results. Ensure you’re both getting the most out of the partnership. Is the talent’s content engaging your audience? Think about how they can improve it for greater impact—perhaps posing more questions to followers, posting at different times or varying the content formats and social platforms used. Experiment, monitor the results and share them with your celebrity partner. Empower them with data findings to help them further develop their content skills and expand their own brand, because ultimately, their success with social content means success for your brand as well.
Content Engagement Made Easier
A brand’s’ ability to mobilize prominent ambassadors and manage their content is improving with advanced technology. At Greenfly, we work with top brands including sports leagues, media and entertainment companies, and consumer products firms to activate their valuable communities—including celebrities—quickly, efficiently and at scale.
Greenfly was co-founded by former Major League Baseball All-Star Shawn Green, who desired to streamline the ongoing requests he received for authentic content based on his storied career. The Greenfly platform enables brands to source, create and share social content with talent. It offers a private, collaborative space via an easy-to-use mobile app, which can serve as a “virtual camera crew” on-the-go.
“Even as a retired player, I’m often asked to send in videos to my former teams, to media companies, and to brands when current events tie into events or achievements in my past life. Greenfly spawned out of my desire to technologically simplify these interactions and enable brands to scale their intake of great content from the right people at the right moments.” – Shawn Green
In practice, brand teams send their celebrity ambassador a short creative brief within the app for video or photo content they want (such as a shout-out to a sports team or an AMA response to a fan question). Once the celebrity makes their content, brand teams can review, comment, approve and send back to them via simple in-app messaging. The celebrity publishes the finished content across their social accounts through the app and the brand teams publish across their own social and digital channels in the same way. Similarly, brand teams can ask their ambassador to share produced brand content (such as product photos or tune-in promotional clips) via the app and analyze content performance.
Our brand partners have noted that by using Greenfly, celebrity activation and participation in the content process has increased significantly for them.
Fitness and nutrition company Beachbody uses Greenfly to request Instagram videos from its community of celebrity trainers, each with large and active Instagram followings. The company shares these short trainer videos and packages them together for longer Beachbody Instagram Stories and videos. This activity has helped Beachbody increase brand followers and reach, and provide additional exposure for the trainers.
Working with a well-known personality can be a significant boost to brands that want to amplify their social presence. To master your celebrity social media content partnerships, take the time to select the right ambassador, give them the correct tools to streamline the creation and sharing of content that engages your audience, and watch your audiences and fortunes grow.
Are you looking to excel at celebrity social media content? Contact us at Greenfly.
