Q&A: HelloFresh's Sr. Social Media Manager shares tips on developing your social strategy

By Marissa Window
Inspiration

Creating an impactful social strategy can be a difficult task. How do you ensure your content is on brand? How do you know what type of content will resonate with your audience?

One brand that stands out with their playful tone of voice and engaging Tweets is recipe-kit delivery service HelloFresh. We chatted with Clementine Berlioz, Senior Social Media Manager, at @HelloFresh to learn more about their Twitter strategy. 

Tell us a bit about yourself.

I'm Clementine Berlioz, the Senior Social Manager at HelloFresh. I was raised by French parents whose hobbies involved cooking, and I developed an infatuation with food and cuisines. After working in the tech space while maintaining a personal food blog, I started working for HelloFresh in New York. My current job includes both my passions: food and tech. 

What does a typical day look like for you as a social media manager?  

I need to be connected almost all the time. By the time I arrive at the office, I have already checked activity on our social platforms. I am lucky to have a great team who helps with social content and community management. 

I focus on planning strategic campaigns, getting assets we need for each platform, getting our brand message across, and analyzing performance. On a typical day, I coordinate campaigns with the team and brief photos and videos. I try to participate in the content creation as much as I can to make sure it resonates with our audience. Additionally, I write and schedule posts for the week, catch up with my team on projects, and oversee analytics reports. My day ends at night, before going to bed, when I check our channels one last time and read comments from the day. I sleep better when I know our customers are excited by our recipes and their needs are well attended.

How does Twitter play a role 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. Can you describe it in a few words?

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 your brand voice play into your visual brand identity? What unique visual aspects represent your brand and reinforce your voice? 

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.

What are a few Tweet examples that you think really 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. These are funny examples.

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 all have implemented some creative partnerships with other brands and influencers. How do you determine which partnerships are the best fit for the brand? What’s an example a partnership that standouts to you?

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 60K people in one day on Twitter.

What tips do you have for brands trying to define their brand 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 last 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% increase in engagement by optimizing our content and testing small innovations every week.

Know a brand doing interesting things on Twitter? Tweet us @TwitterBusiness.

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