In our recent report analyzing the social media impact of B2C industries, we found that not only do apparel brands have some of the largest audiences on social, we also discovered that fashion marketing excels at engaging audiences.
Let’s take a look at the data.
We analyzed 350,000 posts from 213 brands across 10 B2C industries on five social media channels from January through October, 2015. In the fashion and apparel industry, we based our analysis on the top 27 apparel brands in the Global 500 and leading apparel brands on social media as identified by the TrackMaven platform.
Here are six key takeaways marketers can use from the social media successful in the fashion industry:
1. Fashion and apparel brands are in the social media sweet spot.
Fashion brands are in the social media sweet spot because they have both substantial audience growth and strong content engagement on social media, indicating highly impactful social content. The apparel industry’s 18.62 percent average follower growth per brand is especially impressive given the large overall social following they already had. For example, Dior’s audience grew by almost 300 percent, which amounted to over five million new followers. That’s a lot of followers gained in a very short amount of time! A true coup for fashion marketing.
2. Fashion marketing creates social media behemoths.
Fashion and apparel brands have the largest median audience sizes on Instagram (952,000 followers), Twitter (545,000 followers), and Pinterest (18,000 followers). Fashion brands also sport the third largest median Facebook audience out of the 10 B2C industries we analyzed.
3. Facebook is a follower feeding ground for fashion marketers.
Across industries, B2C brands have the largest median audience sizes on Facebook. Facebook is where fashion and apparel brands see the greatest number of followers, with a median audience size of 2.3 million page likes.
4. Fashion brands cultivate channel variety.
While Facebook dominates the overall social audience for the majority of B2C industries, apparel brands have significant audiences on a diverse mix of channels. In fashion marketing, using different channels allows brands to connect with niche audiences and diverse demographics. But it’s important to create distinctive messaging for different channels, using the strategies that work best for each network to your advantage. On Instagram, for example, using hashtags helps boost engagement for accounts with over 1,000 followers, but use more than five hashtags and engagement starts to drop off. While on Twitter, the beneficial effects of hashtags maxes out at two per tweet, with engagement dropping off for posts that have three or more hashtags.
5. Instagram is the social media engagement winner.
Across the board, B2C brands see the high engagement on Instagram. Following that trend, Instagram is the most effective channel for fashion brands, with an average engagement ratio of 13.71 average interactions per post per 1,000 followers.
In fashion marketing, LinkedIn is the second most effective channel with an average of 1.12 interactions per post per 1,000 followers. The peak performer for the fashion industry on LinkedIn was REI’s #OptOutside post on October 26, 2015, which garnered an engagement ratio of 59.24!
6. Outerwear brands know how to engage audiences on Instagram.
Outerwear and outdoors brands are top performers on Instagram (24.9 engagement ratio, or average interactions per post per 1,000 followers), two times the engagement ratio of casual clothing (13.8 engagement ratio), footwear (12.9 engagement ratio), and high fashion (11.8 engagement ratio) brands on average.
The Instagram post with the highest engagement ratio for the fashion industry was a photo of a mountain by ARC’TERYX that received 104.71 interactions per 1,000 followers.
Want to learn about the performance of other B2C industries and brands on social? Check out our 2016 B2C Social Media Impact Report!
