Women’s fashion brands on social media are not all equal. Some brands have been doing better than others. A few brands have outperformed their competitors, but who they are isn’t as important as how they got so far ahead. In lieu of Paris Fashion Week, a detailed analysis of activity, interactivity, and engagement amongst women’s clothing brands was a logical next step for us.
Mesdames et Messieurs, it’s my pleasure to announce the first Sotrender report concerning the French market and fashion brands! It was prepared by our Paris client, digital marketing agency BDBL Media, with support from Sotrender and based on our social media analytics. We hereby present the key findings and infographic. And if you would like to learn more, there is also a full report in French.
Women’s fashion brands on social media
Over the past few years, women’s fashion brands have been facing a few challenges. Sales dropping, increasing pressure for higher prices, supply cost inflation, and the increasing popularity of e-commerce have left brands with a few setbacks. For them, embracing social media has become essential in staying relevant in today’s market. It allows them to anticipate trends, create long-lasting customer relationships, direct traffic in-store, and extend the customer’s overall shopping experience.
Brands are pretty active on social media, partaking in between 4 to 6 platforms. Without too much surprise, Facebook is used by every brand in the study. This popularity is followed by Twitter, and then Youtube and Google+. Smaller platforms such as Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr are getting some love too. Since they are primarily visual platforms, they are excellent for showing off products.
Most brands are quite active on social media
Which women’s fashion brand had the most fans
Generally speaking, major retailers and cheaper brands appealing to a wider audience have the largest fan-bases. However, there we’re still three brand which had notably bigger fan bases than other brands: H&M, Kiabi, and Zara. Of all fans between these three brands, 85 to 95% of them were on Facebook.
Most fans come from Facebook, but not all
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Which brands were the most active?
International retail chains were by far the most active brands on social media. The most active brands were Diesel, Asos, and H&M, respectively. Among all brands, we noticed three distinct editorial policies when it came to their posting habits. Some brands stick to only publishing and they comment very rarely. Other brands do the opposite. All they do is comment, but they rarely publish any posts. And lastly, the rest of brands do a balanced amount of publishing and commenting. To learn about how all brand’s should post, read more here.
Brands are either Conversational, Productive, or Connected
But are fans on social media interactive?
The highest amount of fan activity comes from premium fashion brands and international clothing chains. The most interactive fans belong to Desigual, H&M, and Zara. In these online conversations you will mostly run into talks concerning the latest trends, client services, and products. Promotions and exclusivity are also discussed, but to a lesser extent.
Social media topics in fashion are pretty much what you would expect
Engagement and Interactivity
We found a clear correlation between the interactivity coming from fans and the size of a brand’s fan-base alongside brand activity. This means that in order to have a high amount interactivity, you need to have a large fan-base and publish content regularly.
There was a correlation found with interactivity, but not with engagement
However, when we analyzed engagement – by comparing the interactivity ratio against brand activity – we noticed something interesting. We found no correlation between audience size and amount of activity. Which means that the amount of fans isn’t important for a brand to get activity. When it comes to engagement, the key factors are brand image, target audience, and community management.
But how are the best brands doing better, exactly?
They aren’t stumbling onto success by mistake. Here’s a list of good practices we recommend you consider when running a fashion brand’s social media platforms:
- Publish quality visual content
- Work on keeping close relationships with customers
- Invest in the right social networks
- Publish content on a regular basis (see also Sotrender’s analysis of the best posting times on Facebook).
- Promote special offers as often as possible
- Organize promotional games and contests
- Take customer service to the next level on social media
- Showcase existing social content on your brand site
- Foster content sharing through partnerships with targeted influencers
- Extend your reach through advertising
Methodology
Information was taken from our social media engagement report on women’s clothing fashion brands. Sotrender and BDBL Media worked together to produce this report. We analyze the social engagement of 70 brands present on the French retail market of women’s ready-to-wear clothing (luxury brands were not included).
We collected or calculated over 80 measures indicative of the social engagement of those brands. Most of these metrics were collected via Sotrender analytics solution over the period May through August 2015.
You can download the full report in French here.
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Torrey Tayenaka
Marta Bongilaj
