What do you do when the face of your brand leaves?By Emma

10 years ago, the role of a social media manager looked very different. It was a “behind the scenes” role, where now, social media managers are presenting on camera.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when this shift happened. But the meteoric rise of TikTok certainly had its part to play (their user base grew 58% between 2019 and 2020). Brands went all-in on video and SMMs became the unofficial faces of the brands that hired them.

So what happens to your brand’s social presence when that familiar face hands in their 4-week notice? Will people unfollow your account? Will it damage your brand if they become the face of another brand?

There are a couple of ways to approach it.

The heartfelt goodbye

Mob is an online recipe platform. Earlier this year, one of their legacy content creators left the business to do his own thing.

But instead of hiding in the kitchen and drowning his sorrows in a big bowl of this delicious pasta, the CEO, Ben, wrote a beautiful post about Toby’s contribution to the brand.

This not only let Mob’s community know why they wouldn’t be seeing Toby in future content, it was a picture-perfect example of a positive and uplifting company culture.

The handover

Especially if a social media manager or content creator has been the face of your brand for a long time, people will trust them. And so, it could be a good idea for them to introduce the next person who will be taking over their role. A couple of fun videos featuring the existing SMM and new SMM could make the transition a lot smoother.

The future-proofer

Brands that feature many faces on their social channels prepare for the inevitable. When someone on their content team leaves, it isn’t such a drastic change.

Beauty brand, Half Magic does a great job of this. You’ll see content featuring their founder, Donny Davi. Announcements from their social team. Collabs with industry experts. BTS footage with models. Their community is so used to seeing different faces pop up in Half Magic’s content, that only the super fans would clock a new SMM.

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It’s very unlikely these days for someone to stay at one company for their entire career. And so, brands should be prepared for the face of their social accounts to change. It can be a lot of pressure to expect one person to represent a company that isn’t theirs—but if there’s a strategy in place for their eventual departure, your SMM will have a better experience with your business while they’re there (which might make them stick around for just a little longer).

Dive deeper 🤿

꩜ Social media managers became the fashion frontline

꩜ How the pandemic changed video

꩜ Ryanair’s SMM resigned over toxic work culture

꩜ We love with Agustina is doing at Death to Stock

꩜ A best-in-class example of a founder who’s the face of their brand

In the pool with…Lottie Legget from Swyft

Lottie’s the Growth Director for Swyft, looking after all things marketing with a background in digital marketing. She’s based just outside Portsmouth, but Swyft is fully remote with the team based all over the UK and a few overseas too.

👉 Find Swyft on Instagram, Facebook and TikTok

What’s Swyft’s approach to featuring team members in social content?

There are a few reasons why we use our team members across social and ads. The most important being that at Swyft we have some of the most passionate team members I’ve ever worked with. Our team genuinely loves our brand and knows our products inside out.

Another reason we do this is that we want to show real relatable people. Our mission is to make sofa buying easy for everyone. Yes, we sell beautiful aspirational sofas with a big focus on style but we’re also solving a real issue when it comes to getting sofas into our homes. Therefore we don’t want to feel out of reach for people. Sometimes using glamorous models for everything can make products feel out of reach for everyday people and we feel using relatable down to earth team members in ads helps with this. As does talking to camera or doing voice overs as they make content feel more genuine.

Have you ever had a face of the Swyft brand leave? How did it impact your content?

We try not to have one face of the brand for exactly this reason. We invite different team members to each shoot to try and get a variety of faces out there and make sure we’re not relying on one person too much.

That being said, we also follow performance and have had one team member perform best, particularly when it comes to talking to camera, so it is tricky. We still tend to primarily use Erin when it comes to voiceovers/talking to camera but we try to make sure other content, where we don’t need a voice, features a variety of team members.

What advice would you give to brands that are thinking about featuring their team on social?

1. Make sure your team is comfortable doing this. It isn’t for everyone and it really shows when someone has been pushed into it.
2. Try not to rely on one face if you can. It puts pressure on them and can harm your brand if they leave.
3. Unfortunately the internet isn’t always the nicest place. So another one for me is to support your team if they’re getting negative comments on social comments. You do have to have thick skin sometimes when featuring in social content as some people weren’t taught that if you have nothing nice to say then don’t say anything at all. For us, this has resulted in some team members who were featured in ads deciding they no longer wanted to be. You have to be ok with that, it’s not ok to push someone into that situation just because they perform well for your brand.

Which piece of content did you and the team have the most fun making?

Personally for me this would be our model 06 launch shoot. This is our big squishy fully modular sofa and so the content showed us building the sofa and changing the configurations. This meant lots of pillow fights, jumping on the sofas and generally having a lot of fun. I also loved when we turned the sofa into a big square configuration and snuggled down to watch a film. It’s a hard life on shoot sometimes haha!

Sadly the fabric this was filmed in has now been discontinued so the content has been archived. Hopefully that means another shoot just like this in the near future as it performed really well.

Content ideas of the week 💡

• Ask your team to sign a printed version of their team headshot and film their reactions. This version from the Los Angeles Chargers is hilarious.
• What the team wore to our social media agency.