Fashion in many ways is greatly influenced by social media. Social media spreads trends and the ‘it’ fashion more quickly than other media do, so it proves to be a great place for fashionistas and fashionpreneurs to show what they have got and built their brands respectively. Amongst these social media platforms that play a significant role in fashion is Twitter.
Twitter is an American microblogging and social networking service where users post and interact with messages known as ‘tweets’. Registered users can post, like, and retweet tweets, but unregistered users can only read them. Twitter was created in March 2006 by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams and was launched in July 2006.
On hearing Twitter, the first things that come to mind are bants and, more often than not, savagery.
Over the years, Twitter has grown tremendously with 330 million active users per month and 145 million daily users.
Fashion Brands And Twitter
For fashion brands, a successful Twitter presence can increase user engagement, make the brands trending both locally and internationally and boost marketing. The Display Picture (DP), Cover Photo (CP), and bio fashion brands use for their Twitter account can be major game changers and draw in the right crowd.
Most Twitter users are teenagers and youths, so fashion brands that target the younger generation have a fairly large audience on the platform.
Nigerian and African fashion brands have quite taken to the platform and use it as a marketing tool, with some using it to drive traffic to their websites. In using Twitter to promote fashion brands, though, fashion entrepreneurs need to always remember the power of high-quality images and, for Twitter, one-liner descriptions.
The hashtag feature has also proven to be an amazing way to get fashion brands to be known, seen, and recognised around the world. Using the correct hashtags at the right time can invite huge engagement and play in favour of the brands.
Advantages of Using Twitter to Advertise Your Fashion Brand
1. Drive Web Traffic to Your Site
Twitter has made it easy for fashion entrepreneurs to link from twitter to their websites or vice versa. By using twitter, you can catch customers’ attention with special offers or the announcements of online or offline events like contests.
With announcements like this, you can direct people to your website to get more information, sign up or leave comments. Another way to direct traffic to your site is to offer a prize. You can ask your followers to go to your website and subscribe for a chance to win a discount on fashion items or a gift card.
All of these can help you not only drive traffic to your site but can also help you get new customers for your brand.
2. Discover Industry Trends
Twitter is a platform where a lot of information is shared. When you do a search related to your business or the fashion industry, you will get dozens of links to websites or blogs. This is one way you can get information about trends in the fashion industry.
If you look through trending topics on Twitter, you can easily find a large sea of information concerning trends in the fashion industry. You can use all the information you find to create new and trendy designs for your fashion brand.
3. Create a Brand Personality
Depending on the type of fashion brand you run and who your target audience is, you can easily create a personality for your brand based on how you style your tweets. When you understand who your target audience is, you can easily plan an overall tone and feeling you want to create with your Twitter presence.
As a fashion brand on twitter, it is also important to plan how you will respond to criticism and harsh comments and how you will respond to customer queries. The way you respond to these will further send across a message of what your brand stands for to your clients.
4. Better Customer Service
Twitter is a great platform to communicate with your customers on. When customers ask questions or say something about your brand on Twitter, you can respond to them either publicly or privately.
As a fashion brand, you can use Twitter for customer service and position your company to be open, transparent, and down-to-earth. You can also search for any conversations that are related to your business and respond to feedback on Twitter.
This provides an opportunity for you to provide the best customer service to your clients and gain customer satisfaction.
5. Ask for Feedback
If you are launching a new product or service in your fashion brand, Twitter can be a great place to let people know about it and get responses from them. As a fashion entrepreneur, you should not be afraid to ask for opinions on Twitter because feedback helps your brand grow.
In asking, though, you need to be prepared for negative criticism and some discouraging tweets.
Disadvantages of Using Twitter to Advertise Your Fashion Brand
1. Hard to Build a Following
Even though Twitter has a large number of users, it is hard to build a significant following on Twitter, especially at the initial stages. Building good followership takes a lot of time, energy, and experimentation with various strategies.
As a fashion entrepreneur, you have to work hard, be very dedicated, and organised to get other Twitter users to follow your account.
2. Character Limitation
Twitter has a limit of 280 characters per post. What this means is that you cannot have a tweet that contains more than 280 characters in it. For fashion entrepreneurs that are not skilled at communicating effectively with brevity, this will pose a problem.
3. Time Sensitivity
With the large number of tweets that are sent daily, for any fashion brand to make an impact and get to their target market, they need to time their tweet right. As a fashion entrepreneur, this means you need to know when your followers are online so you can tweet at those times, if not, your tweet will get lost in the crowd.
Unless you tweet at the right time, when your followers are online, your tweets could easily be missed.
