How Charlotte Tilbury Executes an Iconic Social Media Presence

Charlotte Tilbury’s Opportunity

Charlotte Tilbury is a professional makeup artist with over 100 Vogue covers in her catalogue. Recognizing that social media was the next frontier for building relationships and reaching a wide audience, Tilbury launched a blog and YouTube channel to share her tips with a global audience.  

The next step? Bringing her beauty products to her audience with her eponymous beauty brand, Charlotte Tilbury, which launched in 2013. With an already strong understanding of how social media helps form communities, it’s natural that the Charlotte Tilbury brand understands that social media is a powerful brand-building tool and continues to use humour, aspiration and more to build its following and increase engagement.

Building a Brand From Boudoir to Social Screens

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Charlotte Tilbury’s personality is evident in everything the brand does, from the Hollywood-inspired Art Deco packaging of its products to its approach on social media, and even the use of the signature greeting ‘darling’ in captions and comments. This blend of art and understanding of its audience is woven seamlessly into its key platforms, TikTok and Instagram. Understanding the unique needs of each platform is important for success; this means developing and executing a cross-channel marketing strategy for key platforms. On TikTok, it creates entertainment-first, relatable and culturally relevant content. On Instagram, it shifts focus to breaking beauty news. Along with its flagship account, the brand dedicates a separate account (@charlottetilburyskincare), for skincare content.

This allows them to create distinct content for each purpose, sharing skincare awareness, edutainment, aspirational lifestyle content and more to its skincare account. This lets its original account represent the full range of beauty and fragrance products, including skincare, without diluting from its range of color cosmetics in favor of existing beauty launches.

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“We treat our cross-channel strategy like eyebrows — they should be sisters, not twins! They complement each other. However, our strategy is ultimately to ensure we are creating content specifically tailored to each channel and audience.”

Nadine Bourne,
Head of Global Social Media at Charlotte Tilbury

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Does focusing on entertaining content mean Charlotte Tilbury’s social team hops on every trend it sees? Not at all. They’re selective about which trends it engages with to make sure they’re true to the brand identity. They also use Dash Social’s Trending Sounds tab to identify audio popular on the app however the brand doesn’t shy away from creating its own trends like the hands-on test of the Flawless Setting Spray, putting the “show” in “show, don’t tell.”

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Taking the Magic From Moisturizer to Social Media

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Creating trends doesn’t start or end with social media for Charlotte Tilbury. The brand creates content that speaks to its best-selling products, formulas and packaging while keeping pace with relevant online trends for online campaigns. A great example of this social media approach is found in its most-entertaining post — the brand tapped into the viral “ludicrously capacious bag” audio, while simultaneously promoting one of its best-selling products, the Pillow Talk Beauty Highlighter Wand, and its new brick-and-mortar experience, Beauty Wonderland in London’s West End Covent Garden.

What made this post in particular stand out? An enormous Pillow Talk Highlighting Wand and of course, shopping bag to match. This content earned the brand a 7.9 Entertainment Score*, outperforming the average 3.6 beauty industry benchmark Entertainment Score by 4.3, along with an 8.75% engagement rate* that outperforms the industry average by +124%. They use Dash Social’s own Entertainment Score to measure success. This custom metric helps make sense of views, retention and engagement metrics, to represent the true entertainment value of content.

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Charlotte Tilbury’s online campaigns are typically focused on building product and brand awareness. Each of these campaigns aims to tease products, launch new initiatives and sustain engagement, requiring tailored content for each channel. Charlotte Tilbury’s social-first approach to digital marketing means close collaboration with key stakeholders for a holistic, 360° approach.

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*Data is taken from Dash Social, measuring the six-month period of January to June 2025, compared to July to December 2024.

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Creating a Flawless Beauty Community

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While Charlotte Tilbury is busy creating viral moments on Instagram and TikTok, it’s been organically building its own community on social media as well. Their followers are not silent, either — the brand’s engagement rate on TikTok has grown +17%* over the past six months and exceeds the industry average by +41%.  

This community growth is by design. The Charlotte Tilbury team engages daily with its community across platforms. This allows the team to pay individual attention to each comment, taking community management beyond the typical approach to customer service, which lets its team build a natural dialogue and rapport with its community. 

With Dash Social’s UGC and Community Manager, the Charlotte Tilbury team easily responds to comments and can sift through hundreds of comments from its dedicated community daily.

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*Data is taken from Dash Social, measuring the six-month period of January to June 2025, compared to July to December 2024.

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Transforming Custom Metrics Into Sales Growth

While social media is at the forefront of Charlotte Tilbury’s approach to digital marketing, creating viral content and seamlessly building a passionate community are just some of the essential elements. Driving sales for both online and in-store purchases is part of the magic, too.  

Charlotte Tilbury uses Product Tagging on in-feed Instagram posts and Stories, along with LikeShop to drive traffic to key product pages and direct users to waitlists for product launches, back-in-stock updates and more. They also use its link-in-bio to drive traffic to in-store experiences, like custom makeovers, facials and more.

But what’s all this effort without insights to help you uncover what’s working and what doesn’t? With a large team working at pace, Social Analytics and Reporting allows multiple team members to speedily access reports and gather data. They can also easily reference previous campaigns and use custom metrics to track key performance indicators. These insights help the team refine content strategies and identify which types of posts resonate most. The result? More efficient reporting and a clear direction on where to focus creative resources.