How Celebs Promote Their Brands with Instagram (Plus What You Can Learn)

July 05, 2022

People love following their favorite celebrities to get a glimpse into their glamorous lifestyle.

Thanks to social networks like Instagram, there are multiple features enabling stars to interact with fans, promote their work, and showcase their personalities.

Some superstars are better than others at using these features, and there are lots that business owners and other content creators can learn from them.

Free stock photo of anonymous, application, bloggerWe’ve picked out 7 celebs who excel at things such as creating an exciting brand voice, crafting appropriate stories, and making their social media content popularly accessible.
 

1. The Arkells grayscale photo of band performing on stage

Most musicians started doing Instagram Live during the lockdown, but the Arkells band with 102.8k followers stood out. The band hosted an hour-long Live show for 58 straight days.

Special guests and fans were invited to join using the Request to Chat feature. The success of the 2-month show came from its consistency, intimacy, surprise-and-delight, and exclusivity factors.
 

Lessons for brands:

  • Use Instagram Live to teach something valuable to your followers

  • Let people ask questions about your products/services and brand

  • Surprise and delight your viewers with unexpected famous guests

  • Use the request-to-chat feature to invite ordinary people and celebrity guests
     

2. Niall Horan & Lewis Capaldi

Niall Horan is a great social media artist who uses Live sessions such as direct-to-camera chats, impromptu performances, and story question stickers to do AMAs and highlight other musicians’ work.

Lewis Capaldi is another successful artist on Instagram. He regularly posts casual, funny, and imperfect stories that feel he is speaking to his friends.

Lewis posts stories used his signature self-deprecating humor to promote his music, and fans are always receptive and engaged to whatever he’s promoting.
 

Lessons for brands:

  • Show off your brand’s personality with videos of employees talking straight to the camera

  • Humanize your brand by using question stickers to do AMA sessions

  • Lean into the imperfect and casual nature of Instagram stories
     

3. Jennifer Lopez

J. Lo is an ultimate celebrity to stalk on Instagram. With 146.5m followers, she is the 15th most-followed person on the platform. She efficiently uses all of Instagram’s features, including IGTV, Reels, Stories, and hashtags.

She also posts lots of promotional material with proper tagging of sponsors and photographers, short-and-snappy captions, videos with complete subtitles, and eye-catching photos.

Most impressively, Jennifer uses proper camel cases for hashtags. Camel case is essential for accessibility, as it allows screen users to read each capitalized word as separate words in a hashtag.
 

Lessons for brands:

  • Always write hashtags in camel case to make your content accessible for all users

  • Try to include subtitles in all of your videos; it helps users who consume videos with sound off
     

4. Taylor SwiftTaylor Swift album

When it comes to Instagram, Swift is one artist all brands can learn from. One noteworthy thing she has done is create her own filters for Instagram stories.

Many celebrities put a lot of work into designing particular looks for their music videos and albums. But in Taylor Swift’s case, followers even recreate the looks for themselves. 

So, her AR filters make a lot of sense. They allow fans the same opportunity to stylize themselves using their favorite star’s aesthetic.
 

The lesson for brands:

  • Design your own AR filters for customers to try out your products and services virtually
     

5. Jessica Alba

Jessica Alba is God’s gift to Instagram. She’s not only good at Gram as a celeb but also as a business. Her super robust feed is full of Stories, videos, Reels, and IGTV that are original content created by her.

Being a mom, Alba is used to sharing her healthy and sustainable lifestyle with her fans. Her themes are consistent, and she cross-promotes really well.

Somehow she promotes tons of posts for her companies (Honest & Honest Beauty) but manages to make them valuable and relevant to her followers. 
 

Lessons for brands:

  • Include lots of educational tips in your caption while promoting your products

  • Make sure to provide value to your customers before thinking about the product tie-in

  • Produce your content like you’re crafting for a YouTube channel, not an advertorial
     

6. John Mayerperson playing guitar

Celebrities who became famous for being funny on social media have achieved lots of success in building their brand voice, personality, and reputation. Comedy is a tricky thing when used as a marketing strategy, but it worked well for many brands. 

For people who are keen on introducing some humor into their brand voice, the key might lie in a balance. It’s okay not to be funny in every single caption or not posting memes all the time, but you can use it more sparingly to have a more significant impact.

One star who does this balance properly is John Mayer. He still posts the usual mix of magazine shoots, tour stop acknowledgments, and music promotions.

Mayer’s humor is reflected in casual Instagram stories and posts. But he doesn’t use this tone in all of his posts. They are reliable enough to feel like his ‘’brand voice’’ on Instagram.
 

Lessons for brands:

7. Chrissy Teigen 

Teigen is not on this list for the typical reason of her viral posts. The key takeaway here is her strong commenting game.

Unlike other celebrities, she actually reads comments on her posts and takes the time to reply to them. 

This is something significant for marketers and brands. Not replying to comments means you're just using Instagram as a one-way advertising channel; people will notice that quickly and unfollow or stop engaging with you.
 

Lessons for brands:

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