What does it take to keep your social meda content fresh, engaging and on brand? Recipe-kit delivery service HelloFresh finds that a playful tone, a sense of immediacy and a close eye on what people are talking about online keeps it top of mind with its audience.
We spoke with Clementine Berlioz, senior social media manager at @HelloFresh, to learn more about their Twitter strategy.
What role does Twitter play in your social strategy?
Twitter is one of our main channels. We post throughout the day to catch our audience at the right times. Twitter offers a unique sense of immediacy by allowing HelloFresh to build direct connections with our customers. We love rewarding customers for cooking our recipes in real time. We often use Twitter to experiment with new formats. When something works, we adapt it to other channels.
HelloFresh has a really strong brand voice. How would you describe it?
Our voice is friendly, approachable and encouraging. Our goal is to reinvigorate home cooking by showing delicious recipes can be quick and easy to make. We love Retweeting customers’ pictures with empowering shout-outs. Working in the food space demands creativity. This is why we can also be witty and playful, especially while using emojis and GIFs.
How does that carry over into your visual brand identity?
In order to make our audience hungry for our recipes, we use bright and colorful photography and videos. We always keep in mind that the food can’t look intimidating. This is why you will always be able to identify familiar ingredients in any recipe we share.
Can you share a few examples of Tweets that capture the HelloFresh brand?
This Tweet provides our audience with a practical, easy solution to fix a common problem.
We love appropriating Twitter trends and being playful with emojis and GIFs.
We use Twitter Polls to learn about topics that interest our audience. That helps us make informed decisions for future content creation.
Injecting or revealing humor always works better for engagement.
Rewarding the community for cooking with us and being loyal customers is very important. We have an ongoing weekly contest #HelloFreshPics to encourage customers to share pictures of their meals, and we are happy to Retweet the best ones.
How do you plan and create Tweets that will resonate with your followers?
We create our content on a weekly basis according to a content calendar we share with the rest of the content team. We strive that each Tweet conveys our brand values. When the iron is hot, we post on topics that are spontaneously trending––these are often our best performing Tweets.
You have some creative partnerships with other brands and influencers. How do you determine which partnerships are the best fit for the brand?
We are looking for partners that will share our values and appeal to our audience. In February, we worked with Animal Planet to promote The Puppy Bowl because we know how much our customers love their pets. We created brand synergies by offering our audience the recipe for a perfect Sunday: Watching The Puppy Bowl and enjoying delicious food. The response was overwhelmingly positive and we organically reached more than 60,000 people in one day on Twitter.
What tips do you have for brands trying to define their voice on Twitter?
Create a voice that is aligned with your product and your audience while being unique to your brand. It’s not always easy, but hiring people who write well and bring their own written voices is crucial. You need to find writers who are passionate about your industry and who care about satisfying customers.
Any other tips you’d like to share?
Finding the right content for the right audience can be a challenge, but Twitter offers many tools to test formats, be creative and analyze performance. Being data-driven is definitely helpful, and experimenting with new content every week is rewarding in the long term. From December to July 2017, we measured a 45 percent increase in engagement by optimizing our content and testing small innovations every week.
