Inside BeReal’s attempt to become more brand-friendly

Although the buzz around BeReal has waned since it was introduced nearly two years ago, the social platform is attracting brands—largely in the beauty and apparel categories. These brands are piloting the platform’s new official account feature, “RealBrands,” which streamlines marketers’ ability to build a community on the app. Adidas, Glossier, Gymshark, Liquid Death, MAC Cosmetics and Reebok were among the first wave of brands BeReal invited to the platform last week, about two weeks after it opened up applications for RealBrands accounts in late January. Roughly a dozen sports teams and a handful of universities are also part of the initial rollout, along with celebrities and influencers and celebrities such as Niall Horan, Joe Jonas, Dixie D’Amelio and Avani Gregg, all of whom are testing the celebrity equivalent to a RealBrands profile, “RealPeople.” Check out the latest Ad Age events and award programs Brands with a RealBrands account no longer face limitations on how many friends they can have on the app, which was previously capped at a couple thousand. These brands can also have up to 10 account managers simultaneously logged into their official BeReal accounts. Both were issues that social teams often encountered during their initial experiments with the platform, when it suddenly burst onto the social media scene in 2022. Initially dubbed the “anti-Instagram,” BeReal initially gained popularity given the lack of filters (and ads) on its app. “We saw so many brands hop on the bandwagon early and be really excited to lean into BeReal,” said Emily Moravits, marketing lead for special projects at BeReal. “We just, candidly, didn’t have the product features to support them in a way that made sense. But part of what's so exciting about launching these official accounts is they can actually scale up their following. And a lot of those brands have been excited to see our announcement and have reached back out, and we’re in conversations with them.” someone said BeReal? 🤳🏻👀👉 https://t.co/f8w7gPfFdL pic.twitter.com/doQ54B4mAz— PUMA.eth (@PUMA) February 6, 2024 Despite these new features added to brand accounts, brands will still be required to adhere to BeReal’s core functionality of taking an unedited dual-camera photo at a random time each day, she said. Like all users, brands can post that photo outside of the designated two-minute window or retake the photo a few times before uploading it (though other users will be able to tell whether brands did either or both of these things). To “encourage connections” among the different types of accounts, ordinary users will have the option to tag brands or celebrities in their daily photos, which brands or celebrities can then reshare to their own BeReal accounts, Moravits said. To preserve BeReal’s focus on authenticity and connection to real-life friends, content from RealBrands and RealPeople accounts is relegated to a separate feed users must click to access, she added. Also read: Top 5 best Super Bowl 2024 social media moments Effectively, brand accounts “will exist as more of a public forum on the app and will look different than a regular user account,” she added. “And on [the brand] side, their feed will be populated by all of these posts from users that have tagged them in their own BeReals in that same unfiltered, authentic, BeReal-type of way.” BeReal’s introduction of official brand accounts comes about a year and a half after brands such as Chipotle, American Eagle and e.l.f. Beauty began experimenting with the app while it surged in popularity with Gen Z. Gen Zers appreciated BeReal’s emphasis on authenticity by requiring users to share candid, unedited photos of themselves within a random two-minute window each day, prompted by a daily notification. View this post on Instagram A post shared by e.l.f. Cosmetics and Skincare (@elfcosmetics) But several of the features designed to make the app more authentic for users—such as a cap on the number of friends you can accept—also made it difficult for brands to navigate, said Nathan Jun Poekert, founder of consultancy JUN Social and former director of social media, branded content and digital innovation at American Eagle. Accounts were initially limited to only about 2,000 friends, he said. Although the initial excitement around BeReal may have died down since U.S. consumers began using the app in 2022, the platform hovers between 23 and 25 million daily active users, according to a BeReal representative. That number has been steadily growing since last June, when roughly 20 million people were logging into BeReal daily, the representative added. (For comparison, Meta in 2022 reported that Instagram had more than 2 billion monthly active users. Roughly half—47%—of U.S. adults reported using Instagram, according to a recent survey from Pew Research, compared to 3% for BeReal.) Around 82% of those daily active users are members of Gen Z, according to BeReal’s internal metrics. A wave of millennials joined the platform alongside Gen Z during BeReal’s initial spike in popularity—in August 2022, roughly 43% of U.S. users were Gen Zers, while around 55% were millennials, per Insider Intelligence. Today, though, Gen Zers largely dominate the platform, and brands looking to connect with the cohort are adding BeReal to their social media arsenal. Influencers and exclusive content Several of the brands BeReal has spoken with about launching a RealBrands account have been particularly interested in turning the platform over to their influencer partners or brand ambassadors to offer glimpses of their day-to-day routines or work with the brand, Moravits said. That influencer-focused approach to BeReal is already being embraced by Stefani Fleurant, senior VP of global marketing for Authentic Brands Group—which launched RealBrands accounts for Reebok, Juicy Couture, Forever 21, Billabong and Roxy last week. For Reebok, “a brand that has a lot of amazing collaborations” with brands such as Milk Makeup and celebrities including women’s basketball star Angel Reese and former NBA star Allen Iverson, BeReal could act as a space to preview upcoming collabs on new sneakers or other products, she said. She’s also planning to give Reebok brand partners such as Shaquille O’Neal access to the brand’s BeReal account. ”For us, [BeReal] is about being able to showcase behind-the-scenes content and being able to connect with and surprise and delight our consumers, and say, ‘Oh you just got a BeReal [from Reebok], and it’s actually Shaq,’” Fleurant said. “I think being able to do that will really humanize the brand and also create some excitement behind the brand beyond just storytelling. And the idea of being able to utilize our brand partners, tease our collaborations and create that authentic connection between the consumer and the brand will be really exciting for us.” View this post on Instagram A post shared by Reebok (@reebok) Fleurant also plans to lean into BeReal’s upcoming “RealFans” feature, which brands can use to offer additional, exclusive content to users who regularly engage with their content on the app. Users can become a RealFan of a brand by tagging the brand in their photos, reacting to the brand’s photos using the app’s “Realmoji’s” feature or resharing the brand’s posts to their account, according to BeReal. Glossier is also especially interested in leveraging the RealFans feature once it’s rolled out, Kleo Mack, Glossier’s chief marketing officer, wrote in an email. Though Glossier created a BeReal account in 2022, the brand “want[ed] to see how BeReal matured before engaging on the platform,” she said. Now, she considers BeReal to be “another pillar to connect us with our community, specifically targeting our Gen Z brand fans.” Also read: BeReal launches first marketing campaign “[BeReal] gives us an opportunity to further bring them behind the scenes at Glossier, and to speak directly to our most engaged followers by means of the new RealFans feature that has gated content for its most engaged followers,” Mack wrote. “BeReal will help supplement the stories that we're telling on our other socials…[and] we will use BeReal as a chance to bring followers even deeper behind the folds of HQ, offer glimpses into new product[s], faces behind the brand and more.” Adidas, another brand included in the first wave of RealBrands accounts, has been consistently sharing photos on BeReal for more than 18 months, a brand spokesperson said. The brand considers BeReal to be one of the “spaces where [its] consumers are spending their time,” and views the official account feature as “an opportunity to grow [its] presence and unlock new ways of connecting,” according to the Adidas spokesperson. Many of the brand’s previous BeReal photos have featured its athlete partners, based on past Instagram posts that Adidas has made to promote its BeReal account. View this post on Instagram A post shared by adidas Berlin (@adidasberlin) Fitness apparel brand Gymshark similarly established a RealBrands account to “be where [its] community is,” its head of social, Emily Lorimer, wrote in an email. “We were on TikTok while it was still music.ly [and] we launched Threads the day it landed. It’s in our DNA to bring the brand to life on social, so we’re really excited to see how BeReal evolves.” In its blog post announcing the launch of RealBrands accounts, BeReal offers a list of recommendations for the types of content brands should post on their official accounts, such as “a member of the marketing team sharing a photo of the set-up for a big event,” “someone from a product team holding a prototype for the first time,” or “HR sharing a picture from the company offsite where the team is volunteering together for the day.” BeReal’s Moravits underscored the ability for up to 10 people to be logged into a brand’s account at the same time, which, for large global brands like Adidas, enables the brand’s followers to “experience different aspects [of the brand] and behind-the-scenes moments” from multiple locations and multiple teams around the world. Poekert, who oversaw American Eagle’s BeReal account in his previous role, is less optimistic about the app’s potential as a space for brands. A brand requiring its social team—or other managers of its BeReal account—to constantly be on standby for the app’s unpredictable daily notification is “a really asking a lot from them,” he said, and he attributes some of brands’ past hesitancy to join the app to that core functionality—something that won’t change with the introduction of RealBrands accounts. Though Poekert does see the benefit of brands leveraging BeReal to offer Gen Z consumers a behind-the-scenes peek at the brand and the social team behind it, he isn’t sure BeReal is the best platform for that type of content, he said. “I think it makes sense for celebrities to be on [BeReal], because if a celebrity is sitting there eating cereal, that’s still interesting to their followers,” he said. “But if a brand social media manager is walking on a treadmill at 8:30 a.m. when the notification goes off, is that interesting to them? Probably not.”

Inside BeReal’s attempt to become more brand-friendly

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