Trendsetter: How Burberry is using social to turn heads

The question of who is wearing what or more importantly, who is wearing who’s collection, has long been the staple diet of celeb blogs. Perez Hilton and Mr Paparazzi are but two of those with an insatiable appetite for fashion based celebrity news and gossip, as they endeavour to spill the beans on fashion faux pas and successes.  Movie premiers, award ceremonies, trips to the shops or going out for a jog, nothing escapes their attention.

This poses an enormous opportunity for fashion brands looking to gain rapid exposure of their new ranges and products. One such brand which has embraced this opportunity is Burberry.

Who wore what?

Vogue, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and so many more, all came before the bloggers and are still going strong. As consumers have become social media obsessed, the desire to share content rapidly means it’s hard for journalists and bloggers to keep up.   Over 400m a day use Facebook, a platform which Burberry has leveraged to their benefit.  

Burberry 

At the start of October, Burberry boasted the biggest Facebook following of any UK brand, with 9m ‘likes’. To date, it has attracted more than 8 times the amount of followers of ASOS, the only other fashion rival featured on the top 5 brands on Facebook list.

Burberry’s success, in part, has been down to its early adoption of new technologies and a commitment to embracing social early on – the brand’s Art of the Trench campaign, which launched in November 2009, was a huge success for the brand and is still seen as a benchmark for fashion brands looking to embrace social marketing campaigns. 

Tweetwalk

In a recent video by the CEO, Angela Ahrendts stated that Burberry “had a vision, and the vision was to be the first company who was fully digital end to end”. This is consistently being worked on, most notably through the latest ‘tweetwalk’, where fans of the brand were able to view Twitpics of the latest pieces before they hit the catwalk. These pieces were also available to buy at the time of the show, a move which catapulted #Burberry and ‘Christopher Bailey’ into Twitter’s worldwide trending list. It also brought enormous amounts of traffic to the Burberry site, where the show was broadcast live, along with backstage images receiving more than 50k views within half an hour of the show. 

The future is Rosie...

Having reported a 29.5% increase in first half revenues, reaching 4.7m new Facebook fans over the last nine months has clearly paid dividends for Burberry. Although it is a company with 155 years of history, Burberry has taken to social neater than a trench in the winter. With previous campaigns including a holographic runway show in Beijing, exclusive fragrance samples for Facebook fans, and an ‘Acoustics’ tab for its 9m fans, we are looking forward to the next campaign from the iconic British fashion label. 

N.B -  Facebook innovation

Fashion brands should perhaps take note of a recent Facebook evolution allowing the tagging of brand pages. This opens up the possibilities for fashion brands to have users ‘tag’ its clothing in pictures. With an average of 250m photos uploaded every day, fashion houses can reach out to these individuals to tag themselves, or upload their content to the page. 

Mark Stuart, Insight Executive, Yomego (www.yomego.com)