About
Naked French is one of the fastest growing French language communities on the internet. Their beautifully crafted micro-doses of French audio has attracted a global following of over 50,000 followers on Instagram, in just over one year.Ā
The content focuses on the distinct challenges of learning a language as an adult. They also have a bilingual French English podcast too ā exploring life, love and all the stuff in-between with everyone from French reality TV stars to high-school sweethearts.
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The Problem
The Naked French content strategy was specifically built around audio and inspirational quotes. However, when Instagram introduced their reels feature in September 2020, the Naked French team realised that their strategy had to change.
Reels content are short-form videos from 15 to 30 seconds long. For maximum impact, the content should be highly entertaining or informative. It needs to elicit an emotional reaction, and be something that motivates people to share.
In order to leverage the Instagram algorithm and take advantage of the early under supplyĀ of content +Ā over demand of viewers, I worked with Naked French to create a game plan that made reels a consistent cornerstone of their content strategy.
Instagram content typically has a very short lifecycle of 48 hours, stretched to a few weeks at best.Ā IĀ knew I had to create a plan of action that wouldn't require high production costs or be overly time-consuming to execute. However, creating high impact, short-form videos consistently at a low production cost was a challenge which required a disciplined content strategy.
I also knew that Instagram was pushing reels content to a wide audience. In order to leverage that, Naked French needed to position its reels at a much wider audience, whilst preserving other formats such as carousel posts for relationship-building content with its loyal core following.
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The Solution
In order to figure out the ultimate reels game plan, I researched content in the language niche that had gone viral onĀ Instagram and TikTok. I also looked at the key trends that was getting a lot of engagement, because one strategy was to test if riding those trends would also work for Naked French.
In the end,Ā I came up with several content topics to A|B test, deliberately positioned to resonate with a wide audience. Naked French created 2-3 key reels around each of those topics and we tested the performance of each batch.
The content created was relatable and easy to share with others. For example, topics like "Never do this in France", "How not to make friends inĀ France" or viral trend at the time of "French words all sound the same", was reels that we tested and measured to see which resonated the most with the audience.
I also made sure we optimised posting those reels at the highest performing time and day of the week. Instagram will only push out content to a wider audience after it knows that your existing user base enjoyed engaging with it, so making sure your content always performs with your follower base is critical.
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The Results
Many reels gained over 100k+ views in a short period of time.Ā One reel even went hyper-viral, gaining over 2 million views and over 50,000 likes. The content itself was quite simple ā the do's and don'ts of cutting a baguette in France, so it goes to show that creating authentic content resonates with people and motivates them to share.
At the time it went viral, Naked French was also receiving over 500 new followers each day, so the content not only boosted widespread awareness but increased follower engagement. Naked French normally receives 100-200 new followers each day,Ā so adding reels content to their strategy returned a solid ROI.
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