[Estimated read time: 4 minutes]
Luxury fashion is a fascinating industry and its marketing probably one of the most difficult disciplines. For years, luxury brands tried to maintain the exclusivity that drives the force of luxury branding. They lately realized that they couldn’t rely on traditional media to deliver their message and that they needed to add digital to their marketing portfolio.
Digital marketing and especially social media are the guarantee for luxury brands to maintain their presence in order to reach a larger audience.
In a previous study, we showed how well top luxury fashion brands were performing on Twitter. While writing this article, we were surprised to see that many of them were already tweeting and quite dynamically. Even if their usage of Twitter was different from a brand to another, we couldn’t help but noticed some common elements regarding the success of their tweets.
We conducted an other study to understand what are the best practices for luxury fashion brands on Twitter. We gathered Twitter data over the last six months from 29 of the world’s highest-quality luxury fashion brands such as Chanel, Louboutin, Escada or Hugo Boss.
The main metric chosen for measuring results is the engagement rate calculated as it follows:
(total retweets, likes and replies) / number of followers x 100
Results of this study can help marketers enhance their social media presence and expand their following. Here is the complete list of brands we analysed for this study:
| Armani - 2 590 000 followers | La Perle Lingerie - 30 516 followers |
|---|---|
| Burberry - 5 570 000 followers | Louis Vitton - 5 310 000 followers |
| Calvin Klein - 2 950 000 followers | Manolo Blahnik - 129 000 followers |
| Chanel - 10 600 000 followers | Marc Jacobs - 4 912 000 followers |
| Dior - 6 394 000 followers | Michael Kors - 3 220 000 followers |
| Christian Louboutin - 1 810 000 followers | Missoni - 43 400 followers |
| Dolce & Gabbana - 3 740 000 followers | Narciso Rodriguez - 33 700 followers |
| DKNY - 552 000 followers | Ralph Lauren - 1 620 000 followers |
| Escada - 10 340 followers | Roland Mouret - 12 500 followers |
| Fendi - 305 326 followers | Stella Mc Cartney - 955 000 followers |
| Gucci - 2 814 800 followers | Stuart Weitzman - 37 600 followers |
| Prada - 645 000 followers | Tom Ford - 54 900 followers |
| Hugo Boss - 573 000 followers | Tory Burch - 376 000 followers |
| John Varvatos - 38 500 followers | Turnbull & Asser - 7 698 followers |
| Versace - 2 600 000 followers |
Number of Hashtags
Using hashtags is one of the best ways to increase brand’s reach and generate interest toward trending topics on Twitter.
Our research found that it is better to include one hashtag per tweet. It generates a higher engagement rate for luxury fashion brands than any other tweet in the industry. Hashtags are known for creating links between Twitter accounts. For luxury fashion brands, creating a hashtag for an event (e.g. #fashionfriday) or a new product (e.g. #pradaboots) is a quite common usage. This is a great way to make it easy for customers to search for and find brands on social media, and also for companies to reach new customers and create an appeal for their products. For example, the recent hashtags #mademoiselleprive created by Chanel for its Mademoiselle Prive’s exhibition at the Saatchi Gallery generated more than 4.5K tweets and 3.3M impressions.
On the opposite, our study found that more than 2 hashtags in a tweet can be counterproductive. Tweets with numerous hashtags usually don’t let space to add images or valuable content.
Mentions
Mentions are when someone tags another Twitter account in a tweet, such as @barneysnyc. Engaging other accounts in a conversation is a way to benefit from a better exposure but also to raise awareness since people will talk about a brand if they get mentioned.
By analysing the average engagement rate per number of mentions made, the study found that one mention per tweet shows a higher engagement rate than any other in the fashion industry.
Incorporating mentions gives luxury brands a real asset on Twitter. Mentions of people are always successful for luxury fashion brands, since most of the time they are mentioning celebrities or famous stores. This can give them access to a broader audience.
Length of Tweet
It is well known among B2C industries that the length of a tweet has a direct impact on the way people engage with it.
Study found that Twitter users prefer tweets that are between 60-80 characters, especially when it comes to interacting with luxury fashion brands. They probably prefer the shorter length because it allows them some space to add extra comments when they retweet it to their audience. On another hand, since most of tweets made by luxury brands are playing with pretty visuals by inserting videos or images, less space is given to the text.
So luxury brands must keep tweets short and sweet to get more attention.
Publishing Hours
One of this study’s goal was to correlate the engagement rate with the hour of publication in order to find the best time slot for publication.
As shown on the graph above, publishing between 6 and 8 a.m. usually leads to more engagement. People tend to post less in the morning, which means that brands will get exposed to a wider audience, as people’s newsfeeds aren’t cluttered with other posts like they are throughout the rest of the day. That gives brands a longer exposure within the news feeds. Other times of day are much more saturated with posts by competitors and other companies, which makes it less likely that tweets will be seen.
What Makes a Great Tweet?
A perfect example of a great publication analysed during this study is this Tweet by @CalvinKlein:
This tweet follows all the rules just discussed, and received nearly 5,000 likes and 1,700 retweets! They kept it short – under 80 characters to give the image some extra place to be integrated.
Calvin Klein capitalizes on Kendall Jenner’s community by mentioning the celebrity right away. Finally, it uses two event hashtags, one for Calvin Klein Live and one for New York Fashion Week to keep people informed of what is happening during the event and who is at the show.
Social media has proven to be an asset for luxury brands even if reaching as many people as possible might sounds like a threat to the exclusivity they are trying hard to maintain. Luxury brands shouldn’t forget that Twitter can be a wonderful resource to reach and engage with a huge audience while expanding their values. Now is the time for brands to leverage the effectiveness of the platform by getting the most of it.
