On Tuesday 12 February, The Industry hosted a Supercharge Your Sales Via Social Media Masterclass at W London with Natalie Hughes, Director of social media and content agency, The Fashion Digital. In her talk, Natalie explored the best practices of individual social media platforms and shared how brands and PRs can use social media to build brand awareness, drive engagement and ultimately drive sales...

Instagram

• Additional shop window / consider the grid
  Look at Instagram as your additional shop window – quite often you’ll find that your potential customer will click on to your Instagram feed before your website so you want it to look good and represent your brand. The grid needs to draw users in and elicit a follow so make sure those last 9 images are the best that they can be.
• Quality content & social-first shoots 
  The general rule for luxury brands is to post high-quality content on Instagram however there are some brands doing amazing things with the space by posting rough and ready content. As campaign images may not provide enough social content, you need images to see you throughout the year which is why brands should shoot social-first content on a monthly basis. This doesn’t have to be super high production – it can be pretty DIY. 
• Shoppable feed
  Instagram allows brands to be totally product focused due to the shopping feature which allows users to link out from the post. Use this feature, however, do mix it up with posts that aren’t just shoppable.
• Portrait vs. square
  In terms of format, portrait works best for scrolling – if you imagine you’ve got that real estate of the mobile screen, you want to be taking up as much space as you can. However, also consider that the image will crop into a square in the feed when producing content.
• Captions
  Never underestimate the power of a good caption – a well-written caption can really elicit conversation which is a great algorithm hack as it gets people talking in the comments, talking to each other and talking to you, all of which will push your content higher up. 
• Hashtags
  You can use up to 30 hashtags in a post but avoid using the full 30 as visually it can be overwhelming. Use a mixture of 10 - 15 low, medium and high-density hashtags. High-density hashtags would be very broad terms such as #fashion #style – those hashtags can be useful but ultimately your content will get lost in the search. Low-density hashtags are those with maybe fewer than 10,000 tags. 

Instagram Stories

• Clickable space
  Instagram stories assume a really clickable space that can re-engage existing audience members that maybe aren’t engaging with you and can also incentivise someone to follow you. It also gives you an algorithmic advantage as Instagram sees that you’re using all of its features which drives your content up. 
• Have fun, behind-the-scenes content, takeovers
  As Stories content is so ephemeral versus feed content which can live on forever, you can have more fun here and don’t have to be super slick about what you post. We can underestimate how interesting it is for people who don’t work in fashion to see inside our lives – share a peek behind the scenes, in your office, studio or factory as that’s really compelling to your audience and makes great fodder for social. Takeovers with an influencer or staff members and sneak peeks at upcoming drops are also great ways to engage your audience. 
• Template apps
  There are apps where you can drop media and copy in a pre-determined template which looks great and can be a quick fix if you don’t have a designer in-house. This can work really well but do consider as so many brands are using the same apps, it can look homogenous. 
• Stickers, GIFs and polls
  The use of stickers, GIFs and polls encourage interactivity but it also means that your content is discoverable. Discoverability should be at the forefront of your mind when putting together a strategy. 
• Swipe-ups
  Brands with over 10,000 followers can use the swipe up feature in Stories to promote products which is a sure fire way of driving conversions.

Facebook

• New algorithm
  Last year Facebook changed its algorithm meaning it now favours social interaction over other forms of content, as a result, posts from friends and family will appear higher on the feed.
• Conversation-worthy content
  As active interactions (e.g. comments, shares, time spent) are favoured, brands need to be creating sharable content that elicits conversation amongst friends.
• Long-form / video content
  Really tell the story of your brand on Facebook, this could be sharing a founder story or through posting video content –  moving content is performing really well on social versus any other media and it seems to be a kind of algorithm hack as this type of content tends to alter the service of the feeds.

Pinterest

• Search engine
  Pinterest refers to itself as a search engine rather than a social media channel which is accurate in that people tend to go to Pinterest for a curated edit of content. 
• Evergreen content
  Pinterest is a great tool for brands and publishers as it has evergreen content – unlike your Instagram posts and stories, when you pin something it can live on and drive traffic to your website for years.
• Optimise captions
  To get the most out of the platform you need to make sure you’re optimising captions for native search, you can do this by adding keywords to your pins. Don’t keyword stuff by listing a lot of keywords, do it in an organic way – let's say you were to pin an image of a piece you produce every season e.g. a cashmere knit, look for terms that are likely to be searched when writing your caption e.g.
  “This enduringly classic grey knit teams with everything from your favourite straight legged jeans to a maxi silk skirt.” 
• Opt for portrait
  Format is really important on Pinterest as landscape images (such as campaign images) do not sit well on the platform. Like Instagram, you need to think about the real-estate that the channel is offering - most people browse Pinterest on a mobile phone so use portrait pins and better yet, use long pins so it really takes up space on the feed and captures peoples attention.

Natalie’s talk also covered the best practices of paid social, as well as the power of influencers with a breakdown of types of influencers and how to work with them. For more information, Natalie will be leading the Fashion Social Media School, an intensive one-week course in the Summer which will cover the advanced fundamentals of social media marketing for fashion brands. Natalie and her team at The Fashion Digital also offer bespoke workshops.

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