London Fashion Week: Competitions steal the limelight

This year’s London Fashion Week was the most interactive yet. Bloggers gained prominent seats at the event, the official website hosted video highlights, attendees tweeted using hash tags, and designers used their own Facebook pages to communicate with their fans.

A stream of updates, using the #lfw tag, provided a good digest about daily events and announcements. But what dominated conversations in social media? Using our Twitter analytics tool, Skyttle Realtime, we harvested tweets in order to analyse key themes.

Link Love

Fashion blogs, What I Wore Today and Adorn London contained the most shared London Fashion Week URLs: competitions offering a limited edition Mulberry handbag, a customised Miss Sixty phone and Merle O’Grady jewellery. According to our tool the links for the competitions were shared a 172 and 23 times respectively.

Adorn competition with Merle O’Grady prize

WIWT competiton with Mulberry and Miss Sixty prizes

Following the competitons, the best most shared journal of London Fashion Week was on Fashionmagazine.com, which had its dedicated London Fashion Week section tweeted 127 times. It’s clear, from the analysis here, that competitions, utilising influential blogs and unique prizes, cut through general coverage and conversations.

Key Twitterers

@poppyd, @styledotcom and @londonfashionwk generated the most retweets throughout the event. Tweets from the accounts were timely, relevant and contained a mix of curated retweets from the wider fashion community. Following any one of the three key accounts would have supplied a good overview of the event – if following the #lfw tag was too much to keep track of.

Key brands utilising Twitter well included Mercedes, Liberty and Topshop. Mercedes, an official sponsor of London Fashion Week, skillfully used Twitter to communicate with the London Fashion Week community, which added a layer of engagement and dialogue to their presence at the event.

Who created the most conversation? Which collections should we be considering?

Our entity analysis showed us that Marios Schuwab, Mary Katrantzou, Edrem, Peter Pilotto, Todd Lynn and Merle O’Grady were the most talked about designers; however, mentions of Merle O’Grady were heavily influenced by the aforementioned competition.

Trending Tags

#lfw was the most commonly used hash tag throughout London Fashion Week. Deeper analysis into other commonly used hash tags uncovered the #handbaglfw tag, which alluded to a significant interest in hadbags, but the actual analysis of tweets uncovered a competition by Handbag.Com.

Handbag’s competition mechanic required Twitterers to retweet using the #handbaglfw, in order to enter their competition. This, very tactical, campaign made the #handbaglfw tag the second most used hash tag during London Fashion Week.

Thoughts and Conclusions

- Competitions that involved the right partners and a concise mechanic worked very, very well
- Being active in event related conversations enriched the presence of sponsors at the event – they were more than just the people who paid for the champagne!
- Bloggers in the fashion community are becoming more important each year; as their value increases, brands need to consider more creative ways to partner with them
- Creative coverage, exclusive interviews and back stage access help to differentiate event diaries from  event diaries typically edited by traditional magazines and influential blogs …