Building brands on Youtube: Communication strategies of three successful beauty vloggers

Social media is of increasing importance to businesses and branding, but the inclusion of social media into a marketing strategy does not come without struggles. One ‘business area’ that has overcome these struggles is the business of being a Youtuber. This relatively new phenomenon has sent ordinary people posting video content on social media to stardom. One type of successful Youtuber is the beauty vlogger. Beauty vloggers, a popular content section on Youtube, have surpassed corporate beauty brands in terms of success and subscribers on Youtube and can be defined as being their own brand. What are their communication strategies to achieve this? This study uses a qualitative content analysis to find out what communication strategies beauty vloggers use in building their brand on Youtube. To help guide this analysis relevant literature on customer engagement, social media marketing and the elaboration likelihood model of persuasive communication was used. The results are a first step into filling the gap in literature on communication strategies by the new popular Youtuber phenomenon.