In our December issue, we ask fashion bloggers to reveal their most successful social media posts. Here's a teaser featuring Jiawa Liu of Beige Renegade, a blogger with 181,000 Instagram followers.
Though I’ve been in the social media game for over two years, I'm still constantly reminded how tricky it is to get social media posts right.
In an environment where the ‘rules’ are always changing, and followers are a fickle species, it is a continuous learning and adaptation process to maintain growth and engagement.
I find that my most successful social media posts are those that conform to a format that Instagram users tend to prefer. This is a clean image with limited colours, and which incorporate lifestyle themes.
However, true authenticity is really the key to a successful post, and therefore, garnering good engagement from followers is sometimes incompatible with the desire to promote a product.
People tend to switch off immediately when they see an advertisement.
For this reason, it’s a delicate balancing act to incorporate product placements in a natural way, while still ensuring it is the centre of attention.
In my recent collaboration with a denim brand, I created a post around choosing jeans for curvier figures, which relates back to my own struggles with this issue, which is one I know many of my followers share.
This post received 8,000 likes and 200 comments, and the brand received a number of orders which used my unique discount code.
While there is a lot of discourse on best posting times, I’m a believer in posting at a range of times during the day, both peak and off-peak, to ensure that I reach segments of my followers that are online at different times.