SOCIAL CONTENT STRATEGY BREAKDOWN: HEY BUD SKINCARE
Ohh, you thought we were done talking about Taylor Swift? GUESS AGAIN!
How Hey Bud Skincare Turned Taylor Swift Into a Social Media Strategy
BY FAR, one of the only brands to have nailed the social content strategy for Tay-mania was the team at Hey Bud Skincare 🔥
While Pepsi, AAMI, Arnott’s, Dulux et al. were injecting their dollars into OOH (don’t get me wrong, they were fun & it was great to see), our dewy kings and queens over at Hey Bud Skincare were working swiftly & smarter…ly!
While TayTay was making her way to Melbourne & Sydney, the team over at Hey Bud were doing what every brand has been attempting to do for the last year, “be part of a cultural moment” & they NIPPED IT IN THE BUD *ba dum tss!*…here’re the stats (on 30+ pieces of Taylor related TikTok content - I couldn’t pick ONE piece to highlight, so, it was the WHOLE ACCOUNT)
👀 4.8M views
❤️ 245k likes
💬 2k comments
🔖 9K saves
📩 4K shares
What Made Hey Bud's Content Strategy Work
Hey Bud are incredibly consistent in their posting (1-3 posts per day) breaking up the occasional Taylor related post to make sure they’re not straying from their product centric posting (see: golden spoon, social team crawling out of a HB box etc etc) and it’s worked in their favour; the accounts grown 100-300 daily. Wild.
I can only hazard a guess to say that sales would’ve spiked over the time Taylor was in Aus - searches for Hey Bud Skin were UP between Feb 8-16.
I’m curious to see how they’ll ride the momentum they’ve created. They’ve leant really hard into their team’s passion points and been able to craft not just a story, but a journey that’s had a lot of people turn their eye towards them.
Hey Bud Skincare's Instagram Strategy
Switching gears to their Instagram where they’ve amassed 210K followers, a lot of their content has been aggregated (which is great) with an obvious few additions to what they’re posting (it’s fit for channel, fit for audience, it works really well).
The Takeaway for Brands
All in all, Hey Bud Skin most definitely came, saw & conquered the moment.
The Hey Bud Skincare playbook isn't complicated — it's just uncommonly well executed. Here's what any brand can take from it:
1. Cultural moments are borrowed, not owned. Hey Bud didn't create Taylor Swift's tour. They just understood their audience well enough to know it was the most relevant cultural moment happening in their world — and they moved fast.
2. Consistency creates the runway for virality. The Taylor content only worked because Hey Bud already had an engaged audience built through consistent daily posting. You can't borrow cultural credibility you haven't earned.
3. Fit for channel, fit for audience. Their TikTok content and Instagram content look different because the audiences and behaviours on each platform are different. That's not an accident — that's strategy.
4. Don't stray too far from your product truth. Hey Bud kept weaving product-centric posts between the Taylor content. The cultural moment opened the door — the product content closed the sale.
This is exactly what a purposeful social media content strategy looks like in action. Not chasing trends blindly — understanding your audience deeply enough to know which moments are worth showing up for.
Want to build a social media content strategy that shows up in the right cultural moments? Book your FREE consultation
