Part of our ongoing coverage of the ArabNet Cairo Conference, we will be bringing you 4 social media case studies. This week we will be highlighting lessons learnt from Diwanee’s social media approach for L’Oréal Professionnel.

Social media “is all about creating a COMMUNITY around subjects of interest, and LISTENING to that community”, Stephanie Chaanine, Online Communities Director at Diwanee.

Diwanee is a Digital Media Agency is Beirut, Lebanon with a growing clientele in the GCC and the region. L’Oréal Professionnel is a professional hair care product and one of several brands that Diwanee is managing the online community of from L’Oréal GCC since early 2011.

How do you get a home-service centered community to engage with a Salon oriented product? The challenge was to address women and men in the Arabian Gulf and encourage them to move towards a more scientific and professional approach to hair-care

Working out of Lebanon to serve a cultural different market of consumers can be difficult without the correct insights and knowledge, “We needed to be very careful about the content we shared and whether it was suitable for our audience” said Stephanie.

“We based our strategy around women’s love for beautiful hair, and therefore decided to create a space where women can learn more about their hair, how to treat it, maintain its health and beauty, and of course learn new tricks to make it look beautiful.” To tackle the brand with a priority on the user rather than product, a page without a brand name was created for L’Oréal Professionnel: Hair Secrets. This way women could interact more casually and personally on the page, also the content on the page would be more educational and flexible to cover all issues of hair care rather than those specific to a brand. “Hence a community was born.”

While still operating from a single Facebook page and a YouTube channel, Hair Secret community manger uses customized campaigns and collaborations with traditional media stations, such as the “Desert Jewel” campaign to promote their collections and treatments. Notably, the Hair Secrets fan-base doesn’t revolve around free gifts and competitions, rather on quality content that is provided through hair experts and research.

With a growing base of more than 62,000 fans an more than 100 comments per day “the users have started to interact with each other and answering each other – which is a clear sign of a community”, according to Stephanie, “engagement is a very important measurement that we always strive to improve”. Still measuring performance is very important to community managers and clients and therefore “we look for impressions, reach, engagement, social capital etc.”

“It is important that social media campaigns have a 360° approach, and include on the ground activities”, said Stephanie “any campaign should focus on the ultimate goal: lots of fans mean nothing if they are not active, engaged, spreading brand awareness and ultimately taking action ie: purchasing item or service.”