JUV Consulting is a startup that offers insights into Generation Z’s social media and consumption habits. JUV helps companies better understand and market to this younger generation, allowing them to stay relevant and trendy. Our clients include 20 Fortune 500 companies, and to name a few, we’ve worked with Verizon, Vans, Timberland, Chips Ahoy, and more.
Because I am the Director of Social Media, I was given a leading role in a joint project with VSCO, a photo-editing app for smartphones. Since over 75% of their 30 million users are under the age of 25, JUV was the perfect partner to help VSCO understand why young people love their product so much.
I was in charge of coming up with the survey’s questions, so I asked about VSCO in relation to other social media applications, such as Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. I inquired about how Generation Z-ers feel when they use social media: are they stressed, upset, frustrated, jealous, or sad? I also asked them to compare these feelings with their sentiments when using VSCO.
After I compiled the data with a consulting team, I learned that VSCO’s edge was in making users feel creative and safe. Other social media applications, especially Instagram, made many Generation Z-ers feel stressed, jealous, and insecure due to a phenomenon known as “compare culture.” VSCO’s application, though, lacks a formal liking and commenting system, thus allowing users to feel as if they can truly express themselves without facing judgement.
We presented these findings to VSCO, and this research helped VSCO decide that it would be best for them to continue enhancing their feed’s features and photo-editing tools.
On Instagram, I posted content to empower our Generation Z followers. It is JUV’s most followed social media outlet.
Some of the content I created were “Gen Z Facts” and quotes. Edited by myself with Adobe Photoshop and InDesign, they were meant to educate and inspire our followers. These graphics usually had more shares and saves, which broadens our outreach.
So far, I have grown our Instagram follower count by ~17.45%, increasing it from 3,800 to 4,463. Overall engagements are also up, with recent posts performing better than 85% of older posts.
In addition to shareable content, I posted photos of JUV’s team. Usually, these kinds of posts get more likes and comments, driving up engagement. Their followers loved learning about the cool things that JUV's team members did, whether it was posing for a group photo, interning for presidential candidates, or giving informative talks at company headquarters.
It was necessary to stay up to date with news an trends. “Meme culture” changes quickly and is quite popular with younger demographics. Trendy content gets more buzz, making it easier to appear in important groups and hashtags. I shared a post with the phrase, “OK Boomer,” and it was, at the time, their most-liked image.
These tactics allowed me to successfully market JUV’s brand to our targeted demographic.
Our second most important social media outlet was Twitter. Twitter is known for its quick textual content, so I tried to be snarky and trendy there. (Understanding what a social media platform is known for should really drive content creation for that outlet.) On occasion, I highlighted cool news about Generation Z or noteworthy things my teammates are doing.
It was important to keep track of what’s popular on Twitter on any given day in order to produce good Tweets. There were a lot of “memes,” hashtags, and Tweet formats that constantly surfaced, and the more in tune I was with those, the more I could produce content that would gain retweets, likes, and impressions. Responding to popular Tweets of celebrities is also another tactic I use to bind our content to something that is momentarily popular.
I increased JUV’s Twitter following by 130 followers from 1,141 to 1,271. (The percentage increase is 11.4%.) I have also contributed to some Tweets that have garnered the most likes, retweets, and impressions throughout JUV’s Twitter history.
Below, you can see some of the Tweets that I came up with.
