Let’s Dive into Dove

Social Media Audit #1

The purpose of a social media audit is to see what resonates with the audience in capturing that message. Is it different captions, graphics, reels, or partnerships?

Dove is a beauty brand that broke the stereotype of what mass media has created. Their mission is “Real Beauty.” They want to spread a message about empowering women and their natural beauty. I took the time to produce two different audits about Dove’s Instagram and Facebook.

Instagram – @dove

Dove Global Channel | 1.4 million followers | 25 posts audited

TOP 3 Posts:

NYC Reel with Dove: KPI = 72,668
New Season Scent Release for Fall: KPI = 70,721
Sesame Street Collaboration: KPI = 55,453

A Key Performance Indicator (KPI), is a sum of each posts likes, comments, and shares. Dove’s content varies drastically with their KPI’s. Certain posts do extremely well, and others get less than 1,000 interactions. Most of their successful posts are niche to their brand. For example, their collab with Sesame Street or Crumbl did very well a numerous amount of times. The engagement was many comments saying “heading to target right now” or “LOVE.” But their sample scent reels and graphics, did not do as great consistently. People still see or enjoy the post, but do not engage as much.

Social Media Audit #2

Facebook – @dove

Dove: Health/Beauty | 26 million followers | 25 posts audited

I noticed a big difference between Dove’s Instagram and Facebook objectives. There was different graphics, appeal to audiences, and lower interactions. Although, they did keep their captions and overall aesthetic the same; it just did not jump at you like their page on Instagram does.

Conclusion

Dove’s social media presence is strengthened by a clear purpose-led brand identity and highly recognizable creative content. Its focus on real beauty, self-esteem, body confidence, and representation for meaningful audience engagement. Dove also benefits from content that is highly shareable and culturally relevant, allowing individual campaigns to extend beyond product promotion and generate broader conversations around beauty standards.

However, the audit also highlights areas for improvement. Dove’s social content can become campaign-heavy, inconsistent, and repetitive. Engagement can also vary substantially across content formats and platforms, suggesting that the brand should use performance data more systematically to determine which themes, formats, creators, and calls to action generate meaningful interaction.

Strategic recommendations:

I believe that Dove should incorporate more demonstrations, routines, product education, customer experiences, and practical beauty advice alongside advocacy content. Then, reviewing performance shortly after publication and use the findings to modify content rather than waiting for the end of a campaign. This would maintain Dove’s purpose-led differentiation while making the relationship between its social conversations and its products more explicit. This can make Dove’s purpose-led positioning feel more continuous and community-driven, rather than just global.

Repeating what I mentioned earlier, I believe there needs to be more of Dove adapting to data-led content like use engagement rate, shares, saves, comments, video completion, follower growth, and click-through data to identify the themes and formats that consistently perform on Instagram and Facebook. Also, reallocating content production toward formats demonstrating stronger audience response.

Overall, for Dove to have the most effective approach, it is not simply to increase posting volume, but to continually test content, learn from audience behavior, and rapidly adapt the social mix around evidence from each platform.