How retailers are using social for Fashion Week

London Fashion Week kicked off on Friday and social marketing teams have gone into overdrive trying to produce content to keep their fans and followers in the loop.

The action on Twitter focuses around the hashtag #LFW, so being a fashionable guy I thought I'd check out how retailers are getting involved in the week's events.

All the usual suspects have begun sharing relevant content, so here's a quick run down of how different brands are using social to make the most of fashion week...

Reiss

Reiss has been particularly active on Twitter, with live coverage from various shows as well as tweets promoting its blog and Instagram feed.

So far the blog content includes a regular interview feature called 'My Fashion Week' and photo galleries of what people are wearing at events around the city.

Some of the images posted on Instagram also appear in the blog posts, which is a useful way of making the most of your content.

Overall the visual content is quite engaging, but I'm not such a fan of the attempt at live tweeting from catwalk events as the posts aren't as interesting without a photo to back them up.

New Look

New Look has posted a huge amount of fashion week content on Twitter over the past few days, including blog posts and behind-the-scenes images. It has also created several photo galleries on Facebook showcasing its events.

The retailer appears to be making a particular effort to engage with the fashion community and hosted a pampering event specifically targeting bloggers. Similarly, its Twitter feed features frequent retweets of bloggers mentioning the brand.

But while New Look scores points for blogger outreach, its other tweets aren't always up to scratch. A number of the photos appear in landscape rather than portrait, while another urges people to 'check our Tumblr' but then doesn't include a link.

This is a shame, because the Tumblr features some excellent images that New Look should be doing more with. 

Ted Baker

Ted Baker's only fashion week related content appears to be a Pinterest board showcasing its new range of clothes inspired by train travel, complete with a spelling error in the heading.

The board sits within a dedicated fashion week hub that Pinterest has created specially for the occasion.

Ted Baker has collated a fairly interesting collection of images, however as yet it hasn't done much to promote the board using its other social channels.

ASOS

To my surprise, ASOS hasn't really got involved with fashion week and has only used the Twitter hashtag a handful of times.

Over the past few days it has tweeted to notify its followers that certain fashion shows are about to begin, but then didn't follow up with any images or details from the shows.

ASOS has an excellent social strategy and has run some really interesting initiatives in the past, so it's unusual that the retailer has made such a token effort for fashion week. It could be that it has something bigger planned for later in the week, but so far it's been slightly lacklustre.

Topshop

Topshop is one of the main fashion week sponsors and has been busy publishing content across all of its social channels including Twitter, Pinterest and the blog.

The retailer is hosting one of the event spaces so its tweets largely focus on the different shows taking place there. The social team has been tweeting Vines and images from the shows, as well as updates about the running order.

Topshop also does an okay job of promoting its other social channels, which includes Instagram posts, Facebook galleries, Pinterest boards and a live stream of the fashion shows. However the mentions are still fairly infrequent and I think more could be done to integrate the different channels into a more coherent campaign.

The use of Vine is particularly inventive as it gives followers a look at the models getting ready for the show as well as footage of the catwalk. 

Unfortunately Topshop fell into the usual trap of trying to cram too many different clips into the Vine, with the result being that it's difficult to work out what's going on. 

Burberry

Burberry is also hosting its own shows as part of fashion week and consequently has been tweeting non-stop to raise awareness.

On Monday the fashion brand live streamed its fashion show on Twitter and also tweeted numerous images of celebrities in the audience and models on the catwalk.

Burberry also appears to have signed some sort of sponsorship deal with Apple as all of its tweets say "shot with #iPhone5s".

Burberry also setup a 'beauty booth' and tweeted photos of various celebrities holding up cards displaying their Twitter handle and the hashtag #beautybooth.

Another of its tactics has been to tweet images of models in the booth holding cards bearing the Twitter handles of various fashion brands and publications in order to try and get them to retweet details to their followers. 

The brands targeted so far include @BritishVogue, @GlamourMagUK and @Harrods, but unbelievably Burberry has neglected to tweet @Econsultancy...

Burberry has also involved its other social channels including Vine, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and Facebook. In the run up to the shows Burberry posted promo videos on YouTube, followed by coverage of the entire event and a short highlights package.

The teaser for the women's campaign has so far been viewed by more than 360,000 people, so clearly there's an appetite for this type of content online.

Burberry then used Pinterest, Instagram and Vine to post images and videos during the shows, including backstage and live on the catwalk.

It's a great way of giving people access to the shows and maximising exposure for the brand, though again I'm not a massive fan of the Vines.