When Dove launched the pioneering ‘Campaign For Real Beauty’ 10 years ago, portrayal of female beauty in magazines was arguably the biggest influence on self-esteem and body confidence among young women and girls. But Dove’s research shows that influence has now shifted to social media; 67% of women say ‘likes’ and comments shape the way they feel about their appearance. Research also shows that Twitter is the most popular platform for beauty comments and women are twice as likely to tweet something negative as positive about their own appearance. Dove set out to change the conversation about beauty on Twitter.

We drove a radical change of tone on Twitter. Compared to Oscars night 2014, there were 30% fewer critical tweets and 69% more positive tweets about ‘self’ beauty in 2015. From February 19-28, there were 411,000 tweets mentioning #SpeakBeautiful – 52,000 in the first four days. Dove outperformed all other Oscars advertisers on engagement. With 5.9 million tweets, 801 million global social media impressions and a unique audience of 3 million, Dove is in a position to help reduce negativity on social media, help women be confident in their own appearance, and re-establish the brand as a thought leader on beauty.

#SpeakBeautiful launched on Twitter on Oscars night. Dove also advertised on TV during the show, sharing incredibly powerful data in both media – in real time – about negative beauty terms on Twitter and encouraging users to change the conversation with #SpeakBeautiful. Dove partnered with Twitter to create a custom algorithm. It was developed to identify negative tweets that Dove’s team of Community Managers could counter with positives. So when users posted a self-critical comment, the algorithm identified it using keywords such as ‘ugly’ and Dove connected and tweeted back to encourage a change of behaviour.

Amid the chatter of social media, young women and girls are subject to some highly critical comments that can seriously affect their confidence. We realised that, although Dove could go out there and talk about this issue as it relates to beauty, a partnership with a platform where negativity is a problem would allow Dove to make a difference. Because our analysis showed that negative beauty sentiment peaks around red carpet events, we decided to start the process of raising awareness and changing the tone of the conversation on Oscars night, 2015.