The Challenge

Social media impact happens in real time; brand response does not.

This marquee skincare line is one of the leading skincare and cosmetics brands in the world. Two of their primary competitors began to make major inroads into their market share. Starting in 2020, this trend was exacerbated by the rise of “skinfluencers,” influencers in the skincare industry, on TikTok and other social channels, who utilized the new social media platform to push product recommendations, resulting in substantially increased search volume and skyrocketing some competitors ahead of others.

The Solution

Brands struggle to keep up with the volume of data.

In today’s world of big data, ingesting and making sense of social media posts can be a full-time job. Consider that within the skincare industry alone, there are over 3.5 million hours of TikTok videos, 2.5 billion Instagram posts, and 11 million tweets annually. But combing through all of those sources to find the handful of meaningful posts is only half the battle—bringing in sales data to truly understand a post’s impact on a brand’s business is at the heart of Credera’s TrendSmart™ solution. Credera’s approach was to combine the software and service approach to deliver meaningful insights to the company.

This client engaged Credera through their partnership with advertising agency DDB to expand their TrendSmart™ social media monitoring solution to include TikTok and other teen-focused social media platforms. The tool leverages AWS Fargate to scale ingestion to handle the massive load of social posts. From there it uses Apache Spark running on AWS Glue to perform transcription, sentiment analysis, graph analytics, and other advanced data preparation techniques to generate features.

These features are used to build a time series forecasting model for social media trends related to this skincare company, their competitors’ brands, and other keywords in the skincare segment. This time series is correlated with product sales data to indicate which social trends are most impactful. When an impactful trend is detected, alerts are sent to the brand management team indicating the predicted impact.

The Results

Deliver insights and action, not dashboards.

TrendSmart™ is not a dashboard interface. This leading skincare company didn’t need more charts to staff and monitor and hope they caught an event (tweet, post, etc.). They needed insights—answers to the questions that would drive their business forward and position themselves strategically better than their competition.

One of the biggest questions “was how long after a post occurs is the impact to sales realized?” The Credera team utilized TrendSmart™ to specifically focus on Twitter, where they found it takes three weeks for a tweet to gain the necessary retweets for virality to show an impact on a product’s sales. Armed with this knowledge, their team knew they would have three weeks following a negative tweet to proactively dampen its impact or amplify a positive one.

Credera distilled all the skincare industry’s data into more than 550 anomalies, resulting in 92 insights delivered to their team during weekly calls over a six-month period. Credera analyzed the data, identified the trends, connected the dots, and created seamless deliverables to provide the insights and action items to the client team. Through their partnership with Credera, their team is now equipped to understand how social media anomalies will impact their bottom line and how to best learn from their competitors.

Additional key insights include:

• K-pop’s emergence as a source for brand ambassadors: Two competitors have both added new K-pop brand ambassadors in the past year. Both brands are seeing some of the top social media spikes (by mentions) and enjoy the top two sentiment among makeup brands.

• The importance of relevance in linking topical posts to skincare products: One competitor’s Instagram strategy largely incorporates topical tie-ins with no relevance or relationship to their brand or skincare. These posts rarely spotlight a particular product and counter to what might have been expected, have had no impact on the brand’s favorability in the channel.

• The right way to incorporate diversity and inclusion: Another competitor tried to think outside the box with the launch of their Twitch channel. User reaction came in a negative backlash, with many posters commenting about the lack of diversity in their guests and featured products. Highlighting the fact that incorporation of new technologies without awareness of current social topics and trends could lead to undesirable results.