Social Media and Branding: Strawberry Milk Mob’s Exemplary Tactics
In the last few years, social media has become the newest and trendiest way for brands to connect with their target audience. This evolution has presented a casual, low-stakes way for individuals to release nuanced, direct-to-consumer content. Not everyone is successful in their social media endeavors, however, there are users with a stellar social media presence that you can learn from.
What’s So Special About Social Media?
Brands have experimented with print, radio, and television for as long as they’ve been around, so what makes social media different? It can be easily molded to meet your needs and provides interactivity that television and print don’t always offer. Typically, audiences can immediately interact by liking or commenting on content which creates a more personalized user experience.
Profiles can link externally to your personal website and act as an additional hub for information. Many platforms offer numerous features such as video and photo capacities, livestream opportunities, and interactive polling. Users can play around with what content styles work for them, and use the various features to achieve different goals.
Live-streaming can be great for connecting personally and candidly with your audience. Polls can help with real-time feedback. Videos can be shared at low or high production levels. But perhaps the biggest draw is that it’s free to use and tends to be very casual, allowing for users to experiment creatively and dedicate as much, or as little, time and money to the platforms as they feel comfortable with.
Certain platforms tend to offer their own niche. LinkedIn may feature polished content with lengthy copy. Twitter is great for keeping it short and sweet. Instagram is a very visual platform that traditionally leans towards still images. TikTok, the newest of the bunch, is primarily video content that can range from a few seconds to half hour-long content.
Once you get the hang of it, you can begin to build a cohesive multi-platform social media presence that can reach your target audience in a whole new way.
Strawberry Milk Mob
Strawberry Milk Mob, a Toronto-based swimsuit company, has an exemplary social media presence that uniquely balances personality and efficacy. The brand was founded back in 2018 by 26-year-old Georgia Costello, aka “Strawberry,” and is run with the help of her two younger sisters, known as “Coconut” and “Blueberry.” They strive to sell “cute bikinis for cute prices” and carry both men’s and women’s swimwear on their website.
Georgia’s tagline captures it perfectly – her bikinis are adorable, and they tend to be much cheaper than her competitors. Her bikinis are sold for roughly $30 a piece ($60 for a set), and the menswear hovers around $50. While competitors, such as Blackbough Swim, Frankie’s Bikinis, and OneOne Swimwear, could cost anywhere from $50 to $120 for a single top or bottom.
Cheaper pricing, while certainly appealing, isn’t what makes the Milk Mob so impressive, it’s the way she markets herself online.
What The Competition’s Doing
If you were to search the aforementioned brands on social media, or other popular swimwear companies, you’d likely see a similar aesthetic and array of photos across accounts. Instagram feeds are filled with various models posing on the beach in swimsuits. Photos are overlaid with filters to create warm consistent lighting.
Move over to TikTok and you’ll likely see lots of short-form videos, once again on the beach or in a backyard, with music playing in the background. The visual theme across competing brands tends to be very product-centric, simply showing the latest swimsuit designs on different models. The absence of diverse content feels like plain and simple advertising that lacks a bit of creativity and fails to develop a loyal audience.
Strawberry Milk Mob, however, breaks the mold. While there’s nothing wrong with the beachy bikini photos, Georgia at times uses similar backgrounds, her accounts are much more playful. The brand has an Instagram, but it’s their TikTok that truly shines and is where an impressive 2.2 million followers enjoy Milk Mob content.
The Milk Mob Instagram
The most immediate difference you’ll notice is that on all the company’s social media, as well as their website, Georgia and her sisters are the only models for all the female clothing, and her boyfriend, known as Brad, models all the menswear. This consistently helps cultivate a concrete “face” of the brand and lets you know immediately that if it’s not Georgia, it’s not her swimwear.
The Milk Mob Instagram recycles some of the video content used on TikTok with a mix of still images. The photos appear unedited, allowing you to see what the swimwear coloring truly looks like.
There are plenty of beachy pictures, but the brand also experiments with other backgrounds. For example in February 2024 to celebrate their seasonal drop they shot a series of images indoors against a pink and red backdrop where Georgia is surrounded by Valentine’s Day themed props. The concept of shooting indoors isn’t frequently seen on competitor’s accounts, and allows Strawberry Milk Mob to be creative and deliver unique content.
As the only model, Georgia does a great job of blending her business into her personal life by taking photos that coincide with what she’s doing for fun. Their most recent Instagram posts were taken on her family’s yachting trip around Greece and back in April, they shared pictures taken during Stagecoach. This gives her audience a more personal look into how she’s spending her time and helps the photos and videos feel authentic. Not to mention it spices up their Instagram feed and provides a refreshing new way to model swimwear.
Georgia has cultivated a strong online presence surrounding her personality, her sisters, and her boyfriend on TikTok which bleeds into the more swimwear-centric Strawberry Milk Mob Instagram. Her audience gets to enjoy fun, playful content on TikTok and more business-oriented, straight swimwear content on Instagram.
The Milk Mob TikTok
If you were scrolling on TikTok’s For You page and had never heard of the Strawberry Milk Mob brand, you may come across one of their videos and have no idea what they’re selling, or that it’s a brand at all. When you then click on the profile, video after video simply shows Georgia. Georgia cooking. Georgia eating. Georgia talking. You might think the profile was her personal account, not one simultaneously associated with a brand – and that is what makes her so special.
The Strawberry Milk Mob TikTok is not an endless stream of models showing off a swimwear line. It is not posed video content overlaid with generic background music. It’s not all about the swimwear and what they’re selling.
Instead, the account is a place for Georgia to simply be herself – Strawberry, her nickname and the brand’s namesake. She has viral “let’s make a drink” videos where she playfully chats to the camera while making herself a drink, and a recurring “reasons I love men'' series making light-hearted jabs at male traits. She also shares lots of content with her sisters, from storytimes to videos using trending audios, and videos with her boyfriend “Brad,” going golfing or talking about relationship “perks.”
Through these casual, fun videos her audience can build a perception of Georgia’s community – her friends, her family, and her boyfriend. You get to see her personality, her style, her likes and dislikes, just as you do with many influencers.
But mixed in with her content are “bikini of the day” videos where Georgia models new styles dropping on their website. Or, a peek behind the scenes as they shoot Instagram content. They recently acquired a floor of an office building to use as a warehouse and there’s been an influx of content showing how Georgia is decorating the space. She also shares videos expressing gratitude when a new drop sells out, or when she reaches a new business goal.
Her infectious high-energy, positive content draws you in and keeps you coming back for more. By offering a little bit of everything – witty jokes, style inspiration, cocktail recipes, and modeled swimwear – her audience simultaneously can consume enjoyable content that promotes her business.
The Website’s Personality
The casual dynamic established on the brand’s Instagram and TikTok accounts further extends to their website. On the site’s “Questions <3” and “Contact” pages, Georgia continues to reference her sister as “Blueberry” in regard to who to reach out to with questions. Using these cute nicknames, while some may argue isn’t the most polished, is part of what makes the brand so loveable and contributes to its small business feel.
Their use of icons such as “<3,” and “:)” continue to speak to Georgia’s playful personality. Even the drop-down menu to navigate the website isn’t what you’d typically see, with categories such as “Big Boobies” and “Match Brad.” Georgia has created her own Milk Mob world using personal nicknames, unique lingo, and inside jokes that create a strong brand identity, and differentiates them against other swimwear brands.
TL;DR
All in all, Georgia has been able to successfully build a 2.2 million follower base by simply being herself. Her authenticity is refreshing in an industry dominated by similar media tactics. By sharing content that isn’t highly edited or refined, that has personality and variability, she continually stands out and shines in the social media and swimwear world.
About the Writer: Madison Bernabeo is a student at Boston University studying advertising with a minor in business administration. She enjoys spending afternoons reading in the park and dreams of traveling. You can learn more about Madison on LinkedIn.
