L’Oreal’s YouTube Beauty Squad: Total Engagement & Social Reach

L’Oreal’s partnership with a group of five YouTube beauty “vloggers,” called the Beauty Squad, has earned the company plenty of social credibility with young consumers. But some of the vloggers in L’Oreal’s partnership, like Patricia Bright (pictured above) performed better than others.

Beauty vlogging on YouTube is a big deal. Some sources suggest there are upwards of 45,000 or more YouTube channels specializing in beauty and fashion advice, along with more than 50 million monthly views from beauty-loving consumers. This surge in beauty-focused YouTube content is the rationale behind cosmetic brand L’Oreal’s “Beauty Squad,” a group of five popular beauty vloggers who partnered with the company in 2016 to help with product announcements, attend key industry events, and create content intended to engage younger customers. With so much sponsorship money riding on these kinds of influencers partnerships, we decided to use Captiv8’s insights platform to understand what kind of engagement and reach these influencers provided for L’Oreal. Did they get their money’s worth?

There are five beauty vloggers associated with L’Oreal’s Beauty Squad campaign, including Patricia Bright, Emily Canham, Kaushal Modha, Victoria Magrath (aka In the Frow) and Ruth Crilly of Model Recommends.What kind of audiences do these five Beauty Squad audiences bring to the table? They’re pretty substantial ones, it turns out:

• Patricia Bright – 1.02 million subscribers
• Emily Canham – 611,000 subscribers
• Kaushal Modha – 1.63 million subscribers
• Victoria Magrath – 547,000 subscribers
• Ruth Crilly – 323,000 subscribers

Pretty significant right? But what’s even more interesting is that each of these beauty vloggers’ followers are not equal. Some are much more active in commenting and liking their favorite vloggers than others. According to Captiv8’s insights platform, for example, Kaushal has the biggest audience but also the lowest number of “active followers” that comment or like her content. Only around 74,000 of Kaushal’s followers were active during February through March 2017, an active follower ratio of just 4.5%. Meanwhile Patricia Bright, who has nearly as large a following as Kaushal Modha, had 133,000 “active followers” during the same period, giving her a ratio of 13%. Size isn’t always the most important metric.

What about the top performing YouTube content from these five beauty superstars? Patricia Bright was once again the most successful, claiming four of the five most-watched YouTube videos among Beauty Squad members in February and March and a total of 915,000 views and 43,000 likes. It’s worth noting that not a lot of Patricia’s recent content has been beauty and makeup focused, which may drive higher engagement, but less relevance for a brand like L’Oreal.

When considering the most popular cosmetics and beauty-related video content, the top videos came from Emily Canham and Kaushal Modha. Emily’s video, which was actually sponsored by H&M (not L’Oreal) earned more than 378,000 views and 15,000 likes. Kaushal meanwhile, posted the sixth- and seventh-most popular videos, earning a collective 384,000 views and 17,000 likes.

As L’Oreal has discovered, finding and partnering with high-quality, relevant, influencers can be rewarding but also challenging. But that doesn’t mean that brands have to make such decisions in the dark. Thanks to insight tools like Captiv8’s suite of social analytics, you can easily have the numbers at your fingertips to know what’s working and what’s not.