One of my favorite social media campaigns this year is Dove’s #SpeakBeautiful campaign. Dove thought it was important to highlight the beauty in each woman and show them that it is okay to empower and compliment other women as well. Society tells women that if they don’t look a certain way, they aren’t considered beautiful, and unfortunately some girls begin to start believing that. What Dove did was eliminate these negative and hateful messages and show women that they can find beauty in themselves and in other ladies. Dove made it clear that while I may not have what another woman does, I can still love myself and appreciate myself as a beautiful woman. The interesting part about this is that Dove started this motivational campaign by partnering with Twitter. This inspirational campaign started because of a very depressing statistic. The statistic is women have posted over 5 million negative tweets about beauty and their body image or about someone else’s. Dove promoted “it only takes one positive tweet to start a trend.”

The objective of this campaign is to address hateful tweets about beauty and promote positive messages. Hate messages are very popular on social media and Dove wants to help diminish them. Dove wants women to feel happy about their self and their body and Dove also wants to promote women to uplift other women as well.

Dove used many strategies for this awesome campaign. My favorite strategy is their mention use with Twitter. Dove searched tweets that had the words hate, ugly, awful, disgusting, gross, dislike, worthless, unattractive, hideous, and more in them. Whenever a negative tweet is tweeted, Dove uses technology to send real responses to real women. For example, if @SassySally tweeted “I hate my body so much”, @Dove would respond to @SassySally with a positive message like “You are beautiful!” that will appear in her notifications. These tweets that Dove send are positive, constructive, and offer available advice to promote positive language over social media. If you search the hashtag, #SpeakBeautiful, you will see encouraging tweets from all over the world to women.

I think there was a lot of lessons learned from this campaign. For one, I learned how much negative messages were on social media, especially from women about their selves. After reading more about the campaign I saw all these statistics that I couldn’t believe.

• Only 9 percent of women admit to posting negative comments on social media.
• 4 out of every 5 negative tweets Twitter identified about beauty and body image are women talking about themselves
• 82 percent of women surveyed feel the beauty standards set by social media are unrealistic
• 8 out of 10 women encounter negative comments on social media that critique women’s looks
• Women are 50 percent more likely to say something negative about themselves than positive on social media

Although I was really inspired by Dove’s campaign, there was some people that didn’t like it. After reading some tweets, women expressed that they felt like it was companies like Dove that cause women to have insecurities about themselves and feel unpretty. Woman complained that Dove’s parent company sells skin lightening products, which doesn’t encourage woman to feel beautiful about themselves at all.

On to a more positive note, I learned about the power of just one tweet. After searching the hashtag, #SpeakBeautiful, I read so many motivational tweets that it truly made me feel better about myself. Celebrities like Arianna Huffington and LeAnn Rimes Cibrian even took part of this campaign and tweeted using the #SpeakBeautiful hashtag.  I learned that once you surround yourself by positive people, you feel more positive as well. Dove had a clear objective and I believe they executed it well. The campaign is still happening and I decided to take part in it and spread the positive messages on my timeline.