Overseeing up to three verticals for Lifestyle Asia India, Hetvi works to push the limit with her role as Social Media Manager. Her creativity sparked a new viral content, which organically gained 1,000 followers for the brand from just that single post and built new conversations among its demographics. By drawing inspiration from real life interactions, Hetvi thrives on originality and experimentation – qualities that have flourished within an environment that lets her creativity breathe.
Take us through your role at BurdaLuxury and tell us about your experience in social media prior to this role?
I had three years of experience in both the brands and the media – just sitting at the intersection of brainstorming, ideating, working with data, and developing a strategy. The day moves around all of those things: spotlighting what makes people stop and scroll or watch until the end. That’s what social media management is about – formats, decoding trends, ideas and what we can do better and differently from other publications. Before BurdaLuxury, I was working at a media agency, with multiple clients. I think that’s where my experience comes from: a lot of digital marketing.
What is your favourite type of content to produce – and is it any different from what people find engaging?
What people really love in India are memes, Bollywood, and dancing – all of those reels are what performs the best in India. What I personally love curating at Lifestyle Asia India is something that I’ve really experimented with and grown over time into multiple verticals: observing culture in motion. Tiny moments which shape our life without us realising that it happens. It’s a blink-and-miss kind of situation; those micro trends that we never pick up on that was always brewing beneath the surface. Those are the kind of posts that have performed well in terms of numbers. I also write for the scroller in me. Will I scroll past this? If yes, then it probably needs more work. If I’m intrigued by the whole idea and it makes me want to go on Google to question more, then that’s something I might dig deeper into. For a platform saturated with trillions of posts, will I read this piece of content? That’s the correlation I see between me and the readers – I’m also one of them.
Describe your proudest moment.
My favourite piece of content at the moment is about dating! The dating landscape in India is a very tricky one, there are a lot of taboos and cultural restrictions in India. People walk on eggshells talking about it, but I’ve built a vertical from scratch for Lifestyle Asia India – and the very first post I did on dating went viral. We grew over 1,000 followers from that one post and gained millions of views organically, the most comments we’ve ever seen. Our Editor-in-Chief was a little hesitant at first because it’s a category we don’t genuinely write about, so it was just an experimentation post which turned into a success story.
How do you approach the curation of your stories – what makes a story worth telling for you?
My stories are inspired from stories. If I have a conversation with someone, then my story comes from whatever they’re talking about. I try to initiate conversations anywhere I go even if I am talking to strangers. I draw inspiration majorly from observing what people are betting on and what they think the future is, what they’ve derived from the past and mistakes they’ve learned from. I’d say I pick up three things in a conversation and I have a note of it to go back to research and dig deep to see if I can find something about it. If it works out, then that’s a carousel or a reel for me.
How do you keep your content fresh and new when covering recurring events like the Diwali party?
As this is my second year at the Diwali party, I think we shifted a lot of focus this time – from big names and all the clickbait content to storytelling, more sequential and more tied into storytelling elements. There has to be an agenda to the whole coverage, so that’s what we changed this time. Also, we made guests do dance trends and social media challenges instead of just asking them to pose, so that was an approach that changed as well.
From your perspective, how do digital market demographics in India differ from those in other parts of Asia?
India has its own ecosystem, we have our very own film industry and everybody’s constantly online, so I think you can find a mix of people with ten different interests, which could be someone’s personality trait. I just feel like it’s hard to put them into a [category], but at the same time you can catch your audience’s attention either with a niche or something very massy. It’s just about how you tweak your content. You can always experiment with your crowd because there’s no limit, everyone is intact. Every room, every city has a different lens.
Why BurdaLuxury?
It lets creativity breathe. It has been a year of being in the system and I’ve grown three different verticals which have never existed for Lifestyle Asia India. I’m happy everyone’s been open to that experimentation so far. Most places in India hire creative people and then they give them a handbook with guidelines and just a whole lot of framework. When I first joined BurdaLuxury, I had the freewill to create. It gave me freedom to experiment and build. No one told a fish to climb a tree, they let the fish swim.
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Note: The information in this article is accurate as of the date of publication.
