Authenticity, Transparency on Social Media? On BeReal, Maybe

I’ve been urging CMOs — and their bosses, and direct reports — to be real for ages. But what does “being real” mean? Don’t look it up on Urban Dictionary; realness is not a trend you can jack. The only way for you to demonstrate it is by first being real with yourself: Who are we? What do we stand for? Why did we enter the market? What makes us special or unique? These are the questions your branding and marketing specialists must be asking — and answering. (This should have been done before launch, by the way.) If you have an identity, if you stand for something, if you meet a need, you’re more than just a brand. If you demonstrate that with consistency (i.e., keeping it real) and target the right audience across platforms and devices, you become a brand they can trust. And if your CX is as good as your social media marketing and advertising, you’ll never underdeliver — and you’ll develop long-lasting relationships with high-value, repeat customers, who appreciate your authenticity.

So what comes next, after developing a strong, true brand personality? Showcasing it, obviously. And as I’ve said many times before, the best place to do that is where everybody is: social media.

Of course, some social media platforms are simply better than others. And each platform has its own core demographic. The job of your social media manager is to compare these demographics and those of your target audience. For instance:

• If you’re selling a new spin on a leather recliner, you likely belong on Facebook
• If you’ve developed a new, revolutionary skincare product, you’d probably perform best on Instagram or Pinterest
• If you’ve created a new SaaS tool for political organizing, Twitter would likely offer the most opportunity
• If your product is designed to streamline, say, digital marketing processes, your biggest user pool would exist on LinkedIn

And then there are the disruptive solutions that upset the status quo and leave the less groundbreaking brands (and older consumers) bewildered — and behind.

1. Facebook upstaged Myspace;
2. Instagram undermined Facebook; and
3. TikTok killed the Instagram star.

As Cal Newport, MIT grad, prolific author and computer science professor, explains in The New Yorker:

Unlike Twitter, TikTok doesn’t need a critical mass of famous or influential people to use it for its content to prove engaging. The short-video format grabs the user’s attention at a more primal level, relying on visual novelty, or a clever interplay of music and action, or direct emotional expression, to generate its appeal. And, unlike Facebook, TikTok doesn’t require that your friends already use the service for you to find it useful. Though there are some social features built into TikTok, they’re not the main draw of the app. TikTok also doesn’t rely on its users to manually share content with friends or followers to surface compelling offerings. It assigns this responsibility to its scary-good recommendation algorithm. 

A 2021 investigation by the Wall Street Journal, in fact, proved TikTok — unlike Facebook and Twitter — “can target a user’s interests with uncanny accuracy in as little as forty minutes of observation.”

For Newport, the TikTok takeover kickstarted “the fall of the social media giants” — and “more bespoke and specialized social networks, such as the Gen-Z sensation BeReal,” represent the future of social media.

So, what is BeReal? What makes it a sensation with Gen-Zers? And what place do brands have on the app, if any?

Behind BeReal: The Next Big Social Media App?

How Being Real Works

Founded in 2020 by French entrepreneurs Alexis Barreyat and Kévin Perreau, BeReal has experienced a cataclysmic never-before-seen surge in popularity since July 2021; active users increased from 921,000 to 21.6 million in one year: a growth rate of 2,245.28% — or about 500% faster than the previous recordholder, TikTok.

Why? Because it’s different. Here’s how BeReal works:

Once a day, at a random time, BeReal sends a push notification to the user and all their friends, starting the clock on a 120-second countdown; everyone’s allotted this two-minute timeframe to first snap a two-way photo using their phone’s front and rear cameras and then upload it (along with a caption, if desired). Only after posting the daily photo can the user see their friends’ posts, on their home screen. No one else can see a user’s past photos. Everyone can see photos submitted after the deadline, dishonorably marked. And many days’ duties come with an additional, “unique challenge,” adding another level to the app’s intrinsic gamification.

But what makes BeReal truly unique is its commitment to transparency — and realness, or authenticity, “a word that can be found in virtually every article written about the app.” 

• Not only are influencers unwanted, there are no filters and no videos, and image metadata reveals how many times a photo has been retaken before the final image is uploaded
• Not only does this demonstrate transparency (and, again, authenticity), it gamifies the experience by “read[ing] like a badge of shame,” breeding competition (and increased engagement and awareness) as users race the clock and swing for a ‘hole in one’

How Brands Can Be Real Too

I asked my Gen Z kids about BeReal: my younger daughter, a 15-year-old in early college, said she loves it because it’s fun with friends and photos; my older daughter, an 18-year-old college student and TikTok influencer, said “it’s stupid… because it has no point.” My colleague, a fellow marketer who at least looks a lot younger than me, said she enjoys BeReal because “only friends can see it, they can’t look bad at old ones, and it saves the photo for you” — preventing another Snappening. And, she continued, “they do have a public option if you want the whole world to see your posts.”

In other words, there is room for brands. Even though BeReal expressly prohibits advertising. But the default setting is private — and the very reason so millions of young people are downloading the app is because it’s not designed for brands or people they don’t know.

The internet “should be weird, energetic, and exciting” and include “homegrown idiosyncrasy” as well as the “sudden trends that flash supernova-bright before exploding into novel elements that spur future ideas and generate novel connections.” However, the “era of social-media monopolies” quelled our collective “exuberance” by “consolidat[ing] and control[ing] so much of online culture for so many years.”

Which is why BeReal is a reaction. Why the brand paints itself as the anti Instagram,” enthusiastically employing negative marketing. And why marketers at the biggest corporations are in their breakout rooms, bruising their wrists on white boards, obsessing over the meaning of being real and instant messaging their HR connections about hiring younger social media strategists.

Indeed, at least in an ideal world, BeReal is where no one is bullied, cyberstalked, or traumatized by the seemingly endless stream of content from better-looking, skinnier and more fashionable influencers on all the big-name apps. While its competitors “encourage dishonesty” and “degrade our social and emotional health,” BeReal ostensibly represents a new “vision for the future, one that is softer, kinder, and healthier.” Whereas influencers are paid exorbitant sums by brands and platforms to post on other sites, BeReal “won’t make you famous” — and if you’re an influencer or want to be, “you can stay on TikTok and Instagram.”

This is certainly smart marketing because today, 10 years after its launch, “Instagram is a veritable dinosaur” (damn!), “culturally ubiquitous but quietly flailing” as it attempts to imitate TikTok (and BeReal!) while its “appeal among teenagers shrivels.” But it’s also representative of BeReal’s lofty goals because, as writer and designer R. E. Hawley has recounted, when the daily BeReal alert has arrived, “I’ve either hurried to find something less embarrassing that I could plausibly be doing or simply skipped posting that day, thus missing out on the experience of Being Real entirely.”

Interesting, for sure, and BeReal warns it “might frustrate you,” but I’d bet there are just as many users who don’t get discouraged as there are those who skip days and lament over it. The data, direct from users, supports my supposition:

• BeReal is currently number-one in social networking in the App Store
• BeReal has a 4.8 rating (out of 5) in the App Store, based on 257,000 reviews

Plus, unfortunately for Instagram and its successor, the BeReal model is so unique that there’s not much — if anything — the social media giants can even copy.

Inside BeReal: The Next Big Lead Generation and Branding Opportunity?

BeReal may not be the panacea it’s been made out to be, however. Although “the creator and team behind BeReal seem sincere in their convictions,” according to R. E. Hawley, “it’s hard to ignore the way that the app’s design [actually] leans into one of the most noxious aspects of social media:” the “expectation of constant use.” For Hawley, it “seems counterproductive” to require that, in order to reveal her “truest self,” she remain “continually available for daily doses of self-exposure.”

Of course, for digital businesses and online advertisers, this “requirement” (read: near certainty) of daily participation is what increases the likelihood of expanding brand awareness and generating leads through BeReal. Well, that and what Hawley calls “the central endless-scroll structure.” 

In other words, as long as you confirm your target audience’s presence on BeReal, you can essentially count on the right people seeing your organic posts; this, obviously, is not true elsewhere, where most accounts are not set to private, influencers reign supreme, and the endless scroll is suffused with photos (and videos) from strangers who all look like facsimiles.

Brands Already Building on BeReal

BeReal “is not another social network;” to date, the anti-Instagram has more than 10-million daily active users — and numerous brands are already benefiting. 

Chipotle has been on BeReal since April 2022; the brand shared a limited-edition promo code, "FORREAL," by posting a photo of a message hand-scrawled on the back of a to-go bag — and the codes, predictably, were redeemed in less than a minute after posting. Its VP of digital marketing, Tressie Lieberman, told Ad Age: “We have a massive opportunity to highlight our brand’s transparency in fun ways for our fans on BeReal and engage Gen Z.”

I, for what it's worth, would suggest BeReal is fun for Gen Z (and millennial) employees, too, representing a new(ish) opportunity to improve employee engagement and the overall employee experience.

And Chipotle, needless to say, is not alone; there are many brands on BeReal.

Digitas’s head of paid social, senior VP Danisha Lomax, for instance, was right in predicting the use case for beauty brands. “Maybe a beauty brand wants to showcase ingredients,” she speculated. “No gimmicks, though. Just be real.” And it seems they have, with L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble and Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty taking cues from E.l.f. Beauty, K18 and Inn Beauty Project. In fact, “a flood of major brands with multi-million-dollar social media budgets at their disposal have made their way onto BeReal” in the few weeks from mid-August to early September 2022, alone.

• L’Oréal Group’s “apothecary skincare” subsidiary Kiehl’s launched on the platform September 1; CeraVe and Urban Decay were already there
• P&G-owned Farmacy Beauty posts regularly on BeReal, as has Sephora’s Rare Beauty line
• Outside the US, brands like The Inkey List and sister-brands Lottie London and Ciaté London are also testing their realness, hotfooting alongside their customers to get their photos up before the bell

Why? Because “the premise of BeReal aligns with our brand ethos,” explains Rare Beauty’s senior director for consumer marketing, Ashley Murphy. “We aim to break down the unrealistic standards of perfection, and we saw this platform as an opportunity to bring this to life while also meeting our community.” 

But it’s more than that: on BeReal, brands can become members of the community; friends contributing to the conversation. “I was only 7 min late this time Im sorry,” wrote Rare Beauty alongside a photo that missed the app’s two-minute deadline. “Its not ok be better,” read one of the replies (shorthand and typos included).

And “for now,” Glossy assures, Rare Beauty and all its competitors “are staying true to the app’s unfiltered and low-effort aesthetic” — an intelligent strategy, alongside intentional typos, of course, if you ask Stacy Durand, CEO of Media Design Group.

Is BeReal Right for Me?

To determine whether your brand belongs on BeReal, too, lean on your experts, and hold them accountable. In a series of simple steps, the trio of your social media marketing manager, marketing technologist and marketing data analyst should be able to determine: 

• The effectiveness (or lack thereof) of your organic social media marketing and paid social media advertising campaigns and strategies
• Whether your brand belongs on social media
• Which social media platform(s) your brand should prioritize, including but not limited to BeReal (and the upstart Paparazzi app)

How? By:

1. Measuring your performance on each app against standard social media KPIs and benchmarks
2. Measuring competitor performance on each app
3. Comparing the apps based on the metrics

7 Sets of Questions You Must Ask Before Approving BeReal Marketing

Before signing off on devoting time and money to a brand-new social media app, analyze your past and present social media performance and the promotional potential of BeReal — and get suitable answers to each of these seven sets of questions:

1. Who is responsible for our social media marketing? Are they subscribed to Customer Engagement Insider? Are they keeping an eye on industry trends? Have they analyzed the demographics of the app’s users? Have they studied how consumers and other brands are successfully using BeReal?
2. What is our social media strategy, and how might it need to be adjusted to reflect BeReal’s best use cases?
3. Do we advertise on social media? If so, who do we target, and how, when, at what cadence and on which platform(s)? Is there a way to reach this same audience organically on BeReal? How much money do we spend, per campaign, per quarter, and per lead? Can we use a BeReal budget, instead, to optimize our content strategy and creation?
4. Who is responsible for our social media data analytics? How does recent performance compare to historical performance? How does our performance on each social media platform compare to our performance on the other platforms? Were there specific organic or paid campaigns that performed particularly well (or poorly)? How can we apply what we’ve learned, particularly based on trends from the last 12 months, to what we do on BeReal?
5. Are there any winning sales or CX strategies we can leverage on BeReal to enhance customer relationships?
6. If actively using BeReal would pull resources from elsewhere, which other tools and/or tactics could we pause or retire to ensure ample opportunity for implementation, testing and optimization?
7. Do we use third-party social media management software? If so, do we know if it integrates with BeReal? If not, should we reconsider using BeReal so soon?

Analyzing Your Performance: The 7 Most Important Social Media Marketing KPIs

1. Audience growth rate: The rate at which your follower count is growing, calculated by dividing your new net followers by your total audience and multiplying by 100
2. Reach: the number of people who see your post
3. Engagement rate: The measure of the effectiveness of your post, calculated by dividing all the engagement the post receives (including likes, comments, saves and favorites) by your total number of followers and multiplying by 100
4. Click-through rate (CTR): the percentage of users who click on your post, calculated by dividing the total number of clicks on the post by the total number of post impressions and multiplying by 100
5. Conversion rate: the percentage of users who take you up on the CTA associated with your post, whether it’s visiting your website or landing page, completing a form, making a purchase or some other action, calculated by dividing your total number of conversions by the total number of post clicks and multiplying by 100 (on social media, a conversion refers to converting an app user to a website user, a lead, or a customer)
6. Cost per click (CPC): more important than cost per thousand impressions, the amount you pay for each sponsored post or ad link click, calculated by dividing the ad spend devoted to the post by the total number of post clicks
7. Social share of voice: the percentage of people who mention your brand versus your competitors, calculated by dividing your brand mentions by the total number of mentions (your mentions + your competitors’ mentions) and multiplying by 100

Streamlining Your Social Media Marketing and Tracking Your Performance: The Top 7 Social Media Management Solutions

If you understand the critical role social media should play in your marketing and business strategies but don’t have the bandwidth to manually manage all your campaigns, you should be using one of these seven top social media automation tools:

1. Agorapulse
2. Buffer
3. BuzzSumo
4. ContentStudio
5. CoSchedule
6. SocialPilot
7. Sprout Social
8. Zoho Social

During each of the demos, be sure to ask if the app integrates with BeReal.

The 7 Cs of Successful BeReal Marketing: How to Show the Youth You Really Are Real AF

Once you’ve decided it is worth investing in BeReal — at least temporarily, perhaps to gauge your/its effectiveness (do me a favor and give it six months) — develop your BeReal-specific strategy, based on what’s worked for your audience and you elsewhere, as well as what’s been proven successful specifically on the anti-Instagram.

I recommend your social media marketing team:

1. Commit at least two weeks to observing BeReal from an unbranded account, identifying trends and opportunities that you can leverage when you ‘go live’
2. Conceptualize, construct, implement, monitor, analyze and optimize social media marketing campaigns aimed specifically at your BeReal audience
3. Create social media marketing content for each campaign that aesthetically aligns with the unfiltered, low-effort feeds of your target users
4. Concoct and splittest novel concepts, without crossing over to the shameless self-promotion that the app makers discourage; I suggest posting a daily photo of either a different employee holding up a BeReal-exclusive discount code (be sure to diversify and include!), or a 3D-printed figure of your mascot (if you don’t have one, task your branding and design teams) appearing — a la Waldo — in a different location in your office or community
5. Capture the essence of your brand and, if possible, incorporate your product or service, consistently from day to day and over time
6. Collaborate with your community manager and your customer support and sales teams to ensure a seamless experience throughout the customer lifecycle
7. Cultivate a ‘branded’ BeReal community by posting and replying to comments and captions (hint: brands that go back and forth with other brands often benefit from exponential growth in reach and engagement) — and offer the community exclusive benefits for signing up on your website (generating a sales lead from a social media ‘follower’)

15 Steps to Strategizing, Implementing, Iterating and Optimizing BeReal Marketing Campaigns

When you’re ready to get started, print out the following checklist, with instructions for different members of your BeReal working group:

1. CEO: Communicate to your Director of Marketing your desire to test out BeReal
2. Director of Marketing: Task your Social Media Marketing Manager with learning everything they can about BeReal, creating a BeReal working group, kickstarting the project, coordinating with other departments, and overseeing strategy, content creation, implementation and iteration
3. Social Media Marketing Manager: Host a kickoff meeting for your Social Media Marketing Coordinator, Community Manager, Marketing Project Manager, Content Marketing Manager and Marketing Data Analyst, as well as representatives from your CX and sales teams
4. Marketing Project Manager: Add the project in your project management software, uploading notes from the kickoff meeting and any other supporting materials, building out the full project plan, creating tasks, assigning roles, setting dependencies, and scheduling status meetings and deadlines
5. Social Media Marketing Coordinator: Spend the recommended two weeks observing consumers and brands on the BeReal platform, reporting any findings to the Social Media Marketing Manager
6. Social Media Marketing Manager: Host a strategy meeting with your Content Marketing Manager, Content Strategist, Community Manager and a CX strategist to brainstorm and develop the content briefs for your first BeReal campaigns
7. Content Creator/Copywriter and Graphic Designer: Collaborate on any content that can be created for BeReal in advance (e.g., generating the QR code for coupons that will appear in your photos, or 3D-printing a figure of your mascot to include in your daily posts)
8. Social Media Marketing Coordinator: Post every day, adhering to the BeReal marketing strategy
9. Your Community Manager and a representative from your CX team collaborate on comments on and replies to comments
10. Customer Support/Experience Specialist: Coordinate with a dedicated sales rep to facilitate the most seamless transition from user to lead and from lead to customer
11. Marketing Data Analyst: Collaborate with your Social Media Coordinator, Community Manager and CX rep to monitor, analyze and report on your BeReal performance
12. Social Media Marketing Manager: Filter, focus and present the BeReal analytics report to your Director of Marketing
13. Director of Marketing: Determines the efficacy of marketing on BeReal
14. Director of Marketing: Dissolve the BeReal working group
15. Social Media Marketing Team: Based on the performance analytics, either (a) incorporate BeReal into your larger social media strategy and integrate the app with your social media marketing platform; or (b) abandon the app altogether (at least for now)

Need Help?

In addition to using our checklist to ensure all the necessary steps are taken, you can also: 

Partner with Customer Engagement Insider for custom social media marketing content

Download our media kit >>>

Read the CEI Guide to Mastering Social Media

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Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Aedrian on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/ECt01A5HZtw
2. Photo by Yan Berthemy on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/TRrBszDmuWE
3. Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/zVkL5L7eGrw
4. Photo by Michelle Moody on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/WkY8KhEFXak
5. Photo by DJ Paine on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/IWKj5p_NjkM
6. Photo by Creative Christians on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/HN6uXG7GzTE
7. Photo by William Warby on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/WahfNoqbYnM
8. Photo by Roselyn Tirado on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/GDWmu0bFfS4
9. Photo by Samantha Sophia on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/EcoPpLsgeSg
10. Photo by Javier Allegue Barros on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/i5Kx0P8A0d4