Billie and Flamingo are companies that sell shaving products. Both of which sell body hair care products like razors. Both brands market their products towards women, with Billie making this fact extremely obvious by stating that their products are "Built for Womankind" in their Instagram bio. While this statement does fit Billie's mission statement, which is to provide affordable shaving products to women, it uses gendered language. This goes against the first rule in Hootsuite's "Gender Inclusive Social Media Checklist," which advises against social media teams assuming "the gender identity of people you interact with." Advertising products to a strictly female audience alienates non-gender conforming consumers who may be interested in the products, but could shy away from purchasing because they are not in the targeted audience. Flamingo's target audience also women, though they are more conscious of using gender-neutral or non-gendered language in their Instagram posts.
Flamingo and Billie are both progressive with their posting and do not shy away from including images that highlight body hair, stretch marks, cellulite, pores, or other "imperfections." Since body positivity is in the mission statement of both companies, it is important that an inclusive array of bodies is shown. While this is praiseworthy, it is also important to note that the people displayed in each company's Instagram posts are fairly streamlined and only venture from the 1950s ideal beauty in one way. Billie presents images of people who are of a diverse range of racial and ethnic backgrounds; almost all of these people appear to be cisgender women. Flamingo follows a similar lead, though they do have a few posts sprinkled in that are not exclusively showing female-presenting individuals.
Circling back to the idea of racial and ethnic diversity, it is important to make the distinction between showing diverse imagery and acting on this diversity. Both Billie and Flamingo have "an 'image bank' of diverse, inclusive graphics that social teams can choose from when creating posts" ("Best Practices for Inclusive Social Media"), meaning that they do not play off of harmful stereotypes and instead show images of all kinds of women using their products. That said, there are no posts that highlight the unique experiences of minorities or explain how their brands are working to be racially inclusive; in reality, "social media platforms are able to create spaces for extending minority cultures" ("The Intertwining of Social Media and Cultural Diversity") and both Billie and Flamingo can do a better job of extending minority cultures into the westernized notion of beauty in the form of female hygiene and shaving.
Finally, disability community inclusion and accessibility is an important aspect of inclusion for both companies. Flamingo has one post highlighting a disabled individual's use of their product and experience; Billie has none. The disabled community is often the first to be left out of discussions and social media, and both Billie and Flamingo have fallen into this trap. More, neither brand has taken advantage of the accessibility features Instagram affords. In "Inclusive Design for Social Media: Tips for Creating Accessible Channels," Katie Sehl asserts that "Keeping social media accessible means recognizing exclusion, learning from your followers, and presenting information in the clearest ways possible." If neither brand regularly posts disabled individuals using their products, they are not recognizing their own exclusion of those individuals and it becomes impossible to be fully inclusive, diverse, or accessible. Neither brand has alt text for their image posts or captions for their short-form video posts (Reels), which makes it difficult for visually or audibly impaired users to access their content. The only success in both brands' accessibility is in their captioning, which avoids jargon, hashtags, and limits use of emojis, like how Clair Belmonte recommends "using emojis at the end of sentences, or better yet, at the end of your caption!" ("How to Design Your Social Content for Accessibility").
I think both brands have the right trajectory and mindset for inclusivity, though their execution is where they fall short. Some easy fixes would be to implement more posts about the specific experiences of minorities, include more disabled individuals in their posts, and increase accessibility in their posts through alt text captions and closed captions on videos. Shaving is such a rich topic for social discourse and both brands have lots of opportunities to use their platforms to show how their products interact with people of various backgrounds, whether they are minority or disabled.