The Fashion Techie

20 Advanced Social Media Strategies For Fashion Businesses

January 27th, 2010

Although the large majority of fashion related businesses are just beginning to get their feet wet with social media, online marketing, and online public relations. Many of you have a twitter account, have a Facebook Fan Page, are reaching out to bloggers, are connecting with your users and have conquered the basics.

So what’s next? What advanced strategies can you incorporate into your online marketing and public relations plan that can take your business to the next level? Forget Twitter 101 and “What Is Social Media”. You already know the basics and now it’s time to go advanced.

Image via Flickr

Prerequisites:

• Understanding of what social media is as it relates to the fashion industry
• Experience engaging with customers and bloggers
• Understand the basics of online marketing as it relates to the fashion industry
• Basic understanding of hashtags, FBML, and SEO

Strategies

Multimedia

1. Take your YouTube channel to the next level by doing “video product descriptions” for all you designs, products or inventory. Have someone model the piece and talk about how it fits, ways to wear it, great occasions, etc. You can also embed these videos into your website as well.

2. Go live behind the scenes of your company. Show video and/or pictures from photo shoots, office parties, events etc. Upload images and/or video to your company blog, Facebook and Twitpics during the event…not afterwards. Everyone does afterwards, but it takes more strategy to provide live pictures during an event and your fans, followers and customers feel like they are there.

Twitter & Facebook

3. Create your own business hashtag for tweets and use it consistently with each tweet. Next, embed the search feed for that hashtag on your website. You can also embed twitter brand searches on your website as well so customers know that people are talking about you.

4. Start incorporating popular topics on Twitter. They are clearly displayed on your Twitter sidebar. Participate in Follow Friday (#ff) , Music Monday (#mm) and many more. Add your own fashionable spin by incorporating your brand. For example use #ff to shout out to all your recent customers or #mm to show off the new song on your fashion website.

5. Stop sharing the same message on Twitter and Facebook. Recently, my friends on Facebook stopped interacting on my page because I was constantly filling my wall with twitter updates. Send a separate message on Twitter than on Facebook. Each serves a different purpose and each deserves a different message.

6. Create a Facebook Fan Page Ad to reach your demographic and to get more fans. It works just like Google’s PPC so you can choose how much you spend each day.

7. Get a Facebook FBML designer to redo your FB page. Add your own custom FBML boxes to the sidebar and redesign your Facebook landing page.

8. Make your Twitter and Facebook friends feel special by giving them special discounts that other customers can’t receive.

9. Start scheduling your Tweets if you can’t get on Twitter daily. A great resource that I learned from a Twibes webinar is CoTweet. You can schedule all your tweets for the day, week or longer about your company and any additional news.

10. Add your social media buttons to all of your webpages. Don’t make visitors guess how to reach you on Twitter, Facebook, etc. IMPORTANT: A while ago I had a client who had hired a separate SEO person. That person advised them not to incorporate Twitter and Facebook to all their web pages because it would increase their outgoing links and affect their SEO negatively. After a few months they couldn’t figure out why their customers weren’t signing up for their FB and Twitter.

Online Marketing & SEO

11. When creating offline marketing like business cards, print, radio and cable, incorporate your online marketing techniques. Add your Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube url to all offline marketing.

12. Start focusing on local communities. Whether design accessories, women’s wear or own a boutique, your local community can be your biggest supporter. I’ve had huge success locally by incorporating local SEO strategies into my website. Sit down and spend a few hours and submit your business to local directories like Yelp, Google Local, Superpages, etc. I submitted Fashion Techie to over 50 local directories, it took me approximately 3 to 4 hours but it was well worth it because now I am number one in all my targeted local search terms. Remember to incorporate social media into your profiles and make sure you also send friends and value customers to those sites to leave a review, it also can help your ranking.

13. Take your contest management to the next level. Doing a contest on a blog is effective, but there are other contest management solutions. Try doing a contest using your own url where participants must submit photos, YouTube videos and etc to receive a prize. Use a contest management solution that tracks clicks and grabs information from participants.

14. Create a webinar for the latest trends in your sector of fashion. For example, if you sell women’s shoes, create a webinar talking about the latest shoe trends and celebrities spotted wearing them. Invite bloggers, shoe addicts and customers to listen in and ask questions. Have a shoe expert as a speaker or the shoe designer of the brand you carry. Also, offer a free shoe trend report to all listeners.

15. Social bookmark all of your webpages and blog post. Don’t just send to the popular ones like Digg and Stumbleupon, send to a number of them. Create a list of 10 to 20 and find an online submission system to automate the submissions. I use OnlyWire because it’s affordable and a time saver.

16. Add social bookmarking and sharing buttons to all of your web pages.

Email

17. Use your company newsletter to engage not inform. Instead of sending out just text, send out a video email that summarizes the text within the newsletter.

18. Get rid of your boring email newsletter design. Take the time to design a newsletter that reflects your company and incorporate all your social networking sites.

Social Shopping

19. Submit your entire inventory on social shopping networks like StyleHive, Kaboodle, ThisNext, Polyvore, Stylefeeder, etc. Be careful to follow the rules and regulations for retailers. Kaboodle has special pages you can claim just for businesses. ThisNext requires you to mix your products with outside products in a 3 to 1 ratio. If you don’t follow those rules they will band you.

20. Add social shopping buttons to your product pages. Let customers add products they like instantly to their favorite social shopping sites.

I’m a huge believer of DIY marketing….but not without training. You know your brand more than anyone, and so does your employees. Get them trained so that you and them can take over your own SMM effectively.