Loving Tan & St. Tropez’s Social Media Presence
Both Australia-made self-tanner Loving Tan and competitor, UK and USA’s premium tanner, St.Tropez are both widely known in the tanning world and are sold at Ulta Beauty for those interested in achieving a natural, golden tan. However, while examining Loving Tan’s social media presence compared to St.Tropez, I found some differences in their social media approach and what they should each focus on in terms of analytics and metrics.
Starting with Loving Tan, the brand is present across Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, and Facebook. Their most followed and engaged platform is Instagram with 664k followers and TikTok with 30.7k followers. This is no surprise as Loving Tan is more millennial / Gen-Z focused in their branding by having a fun, glamourous, relatable, and girly social presence. They have used these two platforms to push a variety of content to reach their audiences but primarily have been leveraging video content across Instagram and TikTok. The brand has keyed into the popularity of TikTok fast and has gone viral a handful of times on the platform. Regarding Instagram, the brand posts extremely relatable, informative, and aesthetic content and does a great job engaging with its consumers and audiences.
Looking at where the brand can improve and become more active is on Twitter and Facebook. Currently, Loving Tan has 3,050 followers on Twitter and 34,471-page likes on Facebook. Unfortunately, much of this content is repurposed from Instagram and lacks engagement with audiences. In addition, much of the Twitter and Facebook content receives low engagement rates because it seems to fall on deaf ears or is not hitting the correct targets. Being much more Gen-Z focused, I think Loving Tan can learn from these metrics on Facebook and Twitter to better their approach to meeting consumers. An idea is tweeting on Twitter instead of just resharing content and creating a Facebook community group to engage users.
Looking at St. Tropez, I saw similarities and differences in the brand’s social media presence. First to note is that St. Tropez is present on the same platforms as Loving Tan, but the most popular ones for this brand are Instagram with 188k followers, Facebook with 210,744 likes, and Twitter with 37.6k followers. The content shared across this brand’s platform is like that of Loving Tan but is a bit more educational-focused and mature. What is different with St. Tropez’s presence is the tone of the brand’s posts comes off as more down-to-earth, relaxing, and self-care-focused. In addition, the branding feels more elegant and calmer, while Loving Tan is pink, girly, and loud.
Where St.Tropez can leverage its analytics is through the engagement rates on each of the platforms. Compared to Loving Tan, St.Tropez does not engage with its followers in the comment section or tagged posts. Additionally, the frequency they post on these platforms is much less than Loving Tan as they only post every other day on Instagram and twice a week on TikTok. One thing to note is that St. Tropez does have 176,273 more Facebook page likes when compared to Loving Tan’s Facebook presence and receives a higher engagement rate on that platform as well. This is because the brand’s audiences are more Gen-X, millennial-focused, which is the platform that caters to that audience. Loving Tan could take note from St. Tropez to create a Facebook Group that caters to their tanning audience and better implements marketing strategies there.
Utilizing Google Trends, I entered Loving Tan compared to St. Tropez into the search bar and saw that the brand’s interest was beneath its competitors. Additionally, it looks like St. Tropez is more favored across the United States when compared to Loving Tan. This may be due to Loving Tan being Aussie-based and St. Tropez targeting both UK and USA audiences in its digital marketing efforts apart from social media. Overall, Loving Tan’s social media presence is more robust and trend-focused when compared to St. Tropez in the social media landscape.
