Live tweeting lessons from the catwalk

sarah.hecks

Campaign recently published this article by me about live-tweeting lessons from fashion brands in the run up to London Fashion Week. They’ve been kind enough to let us reproduce it below.

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With its captivating mix of striking visuals and a new must-have trend each season – not to mention that oh-so-important sexiness – fashion lends itself particularly well to Twitter. So well in fact, that 47 per cent of fashion mavens have bought from a brand as a direct result of following them. This means competition for attention on people’s newsfeeds is fierce.

The social media platform has also revolutionised Fashion Week, taking it out of the magazines and into our feeds, delivering the action in real-time. Today, you can see designers’ latest collections the moment they hit the catwalk, without even being anywhere near the front row.

So how do you garner some serious cut-through in an already-crowded space? Bringing the right content to the right people at the right time requires careful planning, social know-how and more than a few tricks up next season’s sleeve. We take a look at the past Twitter catwalks of some of the world’s biggest haute heavyweights for some social know-how on how to capitalise on live event opportunities.

Build excitement
Live-tweeting begins long before the day. You need to ensure people are aware of the ongoings and drum up excitement beforehand. Fashion designer Matthew Williamson boosted visibility of his AW14 show by activating a follow and retweet competition with offering a pair of tickets to the event.

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If you can’t give tickets away to your event, releasing a series of teaser assets (e.g. giving a glimpse of hero looks) is a great way to bolster interest.

Give followers the inside scoop
Offer exclusive content and you give users a reason to follow and to share. For its AW13 collection, Topshop collaborated with technology platform Chirp to give consumers behind-the-scenes access to the collection. Users were sent a digital image they could tap on, to reveal usually unseen aspects of the show – including images of the pattern rooms, and first-look photos of the collection. Giving users a backstage pass to your brand increases your social footprint and will help to grow advocates for next season.

Interact with your audience
Engaging with your audience is key to any live event. Burberry took audience interaction to new levels at their AW15 show when they introduced #TweetCam.

The fashion house allowed Twitter users to control cameras on the catwalks, and receive personalised images of the trends as they hit the runway. You may not be able to interact at the same scale as Burberry, but you can look out for questions to answer, positive comments to respond to and negative feedback to address. Monitoring tweets can get overwhelming, so it’s good to remember, it’s not just about monitoring – it’s about monitoring the right conversations. Involve influencers Influencers are vital in your live-tweeting arsenal. For New York Fashion Week AW15, Twitter gathered 50 editors, writers, celebrities and bloggers to share their experiences of the week using #fashionflock.

The hashtag was trending in no time, and the initiative was so successful, it is being run at NYFW SS16 this week, showing the impact that influencers can have on increasing visibility of your event. When looking for an influencer, look for people who only post sponsored content occasionally, as they tend to be more trusted and appear more authentic, so choose carefully.

And squeeze…
Just because your event has ended, doesn’t mean the social buzz has to. In the follow-up from LFW AW15, we saw New Look sharing videos of street looks, ASOS showcasing make-up looks, and of course there were bags aplenty in the tweets coming from Mulberry HQ. Even before the event has happened, come up with a narrative framework for post-event coverage, to ensure you are banking the right assets during the event and to keep your brand’s storytelling going long after it has finished.