The event has been gradually transforming into a digital attraction for everyday shoppers rather than just a cloistered spectacle for industry insiders, with legions of people now getting a peek at the shows, clothes and models via livestream or social media. In other words, Fashion Week increasingly serves as a snapshot of how digital-savvy customers get their shopping ideas and interact with their favorite brands.
That’s why a new research report on Fashion Week social media engagement is especially revealing about the challenges and opportunities that lie ahead for retailers as they try to use social media to sell you clothes and other types of goods.
L2, a research firm that studies brands’ digital impact, analyzed the social media posts of 192 fashion houses from Feb. 1 through 18. That time period covered the shows and the immediate lead-up to them, when retailers would likely be in overdrive working to drum up anticipatory buzz. In particular, L2 studied “engagement,” a measure of how many users were enticed enough by the social media post to take an action such as “liking” a post, commenting on it or re-sharing it from their own account.
There is a striking, even extraordinary, difference between customer engagement on Instagram versus on Facebook and Twitter. On Instagram, the women’s brands posted an average of 20 times and generated an average of 92,000 interactions. The engagement numbers seen on the other social platforms are paltry by comparison: On Twitter, where women’s brands posted an average of 26 times, tweets averaged 490 likes and 1,117 retweets. On Facebook, brands posted an average of eight posts each that generated 8,000 interactions.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, men’s fashion brands generated significantly less social engagement overall than did women’s brands. But the pattern remains the same: Instagram accounted for the vast majority — some 89 percent — of social engagement for men’s fashion.
“Instagram really is dominating the field,” said Liz Elder, the L2 research associate who produced the Fashion Week study.
Also notable is how much the social engagement mix has changed over the last three years of fashion shows. As the chart below shows, Facebook has lost quite a bit of ground, not only in its share relative to Instagram, but in overall engagement volume. And that sends a clear message: Fashion conversation and inspiration-seeking is moving at an astonishing speed from Facebook to Instagram.
by Sarah Halzack, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: Ze Takahashi/MCV Photo
