Do we like luxury brands because we buy the products they make or because it defines our personal brand? Regardless of the answer, luxury brands are taking to social media like fish to water, with fans desperate to find out what’s going to be in the latest collection.
Infact, when we analyzed the content strategies of the top luxury brands on Facebook, we discovered that announcing new collections was the third most engaging topic. The most engaging topics were specific product updates (with a fabulous photo, of course!) and questions to fans (usually centered around which product fans would buy).
Celebrity Endorsements Not Working For Luxury Brands?
Luxury brands spend millions of dollars on ensuring they get celebrity endorsements, in the hope that people will aspire to be like the beautiful and successful celeb in the photo. However, according to a report on Forbes, celebrity endorsements like Angelina Jolie’s $10m deal with Louis Vuitton, just don’t work.
In this study, we also found that specific celebrity endorsed content was one of the lowest engaging topics. Simply put, fans weren’t interested in commenting or sharing the photos of celebrities which vastly reduces the reach of the content. When Hugo Boss announced Gwyneth Paltrow as the face of their perfume, it failed to strike a chord with fans compared to its other posts.
Beyond Raw Numbers
In terms of raw fan numbers, Burberry is often lauded as a brand that really ‘gets’ social media, and that’s reflected in the huge number of fans, followers and subscribers they have. However, hopefully every one has moved on from using fan numbers alone to judge a brand. It’s actually Louis Vuitton and Dior which are doing better job of engaging their fans.
By calculating an engagement score based on the number of Likes, Comments, Shares and Estimated Impressions that each Admin post gets, we found that Louis Vuitton scored 104 and Dior scored 91. While Burberry had the most engaging post for the time period analyzed (it scored a massive 995), Louis Vuitton and Dior were able to get fans excited about more of their content.
Aloof Brands
What does luxury really mean? Is it just about being something the masses can’t afford? Is it above the people? When we looked at how the brands engaged the community in a two way conversation, it certainly seems that there is a clearly defined VIP area that the brand doesn’t step out of and the masses can only look on in envy.
Most luxury brands do not allow fans to post on their Facebook page, and those that do, never ever reply to fan questions or comments. Even on Twitter, where everyday brands like Pepsi have discovered the value in engaging the audience, the luxury brands remain resolutely reticent.
Even Burberry, shown as being quite a responsive brand in the infographic below, only replied to followers on June 11th when they hit 1m followers on Twitter. After that, there wasn’t a single reply. On average, less than 8% of luxury brands’ tweets are replies. Why do they want to remain so aloof?
By using the Unmetric Score, which is a combination of various metrics, weighted and balanced to produce a single, benchmarkable score, the leading luxury brand is Dior (Score: 211/300). Burberry (Score: 199/300) comes in a close second with Louis Vuitton (Score: 165/300) in third.