By CR Cataunya Ransom of Mosnar Communications. Follow @Mosnarcomm.
Twitter and Tweets are the most fascinating creation on the planet. At present there is no other place on earth to engage and reach tons of millions to draw brand credibility more powerful than Twitter. Luxury is a perception and for luxury brands Twitter presents an opportunity to target niche audiences.
Within the Twitter universe it is easier to target and find those who like $1,000 Prada Tessuto Baby Bags or searching for Christian Louboutin luxury French shoes. This is why top luxury retailers such as Net-A-Porter, Louis Vuitton, and many others are all actively using Twitter!
Every luxury brand should be Tweeting about their luxury niche. Apart from building Twitter equity, popularity, followers etc. This also helps to build EXPOSURE, endorsements and referrals that can open the door to more revenue. One key factor is that Twitter can help luxury brands establish brand awareness and credibility. Every brand will need to build these elements to sustain and overcome the recession.
One Tweet can be picked up by a leading luxury blog or top luxury magazine. Yes! media outlets are on Twitter hunting for the next big luxurious thing. For all those luxury brands who posted a Twitter follow me button on their website because everybody else was doing it, you might want to get serious now.
How can Twitter help expand the exposure of a luxury brand?
The most valuable solution that Twitter holds for luxury brands is the capacity of its audience reach. The number of Twitter followers a luxury brand has including the followers of the luxury brand followers expands the reach exposure.
Example: I have over a 15 million reach with 2000 plus followers because of the followers following the people following me. To review your reach and see how your Twitter influence ranks go to Twinfluence.
Want to know who is tweeting about luxury the best? That’s easy just go over to TwitterGrader (a system that calculate variables for grading Twitter profiles). Conduct a key search for “luxury” and receive a list of top Twitter profiles related to luxury.
http://twitter.grader.com/search?Term=luxury+
Again, it is not the number of Twitter followers that you manage to attract to your luxury brand. While followers are extremely important, it is the reach that Twitter offers that makes the exposure for your brand so powerful.
I am very interested in hearing about Twitter and luxury branding success stories. What would you like to achieve for your luxury brand using Twitter?
@adamcohen
Curious – the reasons you give for a brand connecting on Twitter don’t quite sound like reasons for luxury brands to engage in the converstion; rather they sound like reasons for any brand. The biggest difference I see for Luxury brands from a marketing perspective is that they tend to have additional hurdles jumping in to social media. They can be overly concerned about diluting the brand and not willing to put individuals in the organization on the front lines of engaging with people. For example, user ratings and reviews on a website can be a significant factor to drive conversion, but many luxury retailers don’t want to intermingle the comments from customers into the experience and emotion they are trying to achieve portraying their products online. They could be giving up ecommerce sales as a result.
I see the same on Twitter: the two examples you provided I think are not quite the best examples of brands overall using Twitter. Louis Vitton has several Twitter accounts (@LouisVuitton_US, @LouisVuitton_HQ) for their digital media teams – the most prevalent/active one has over 20K followers but only follows 53 people back. Is that really an engaging brand? Net-a-porter (@Luxury_Fashion) has about 7K followers and follows 192 back. What do you think they could do differently? What are some tips or advice you have for getting over that brand-conscious hurdle?
@geoferragamo
I see many tweets are redistributed or ‘retweeted’ but so many of them are by people who are selling ‘get rich quick’ schemes – like ‘work from home millionaires,’ ‘get rich quick with the trump network’ etc. I checked out 4 people who retweeted this blog and they were all selling these types of schemes. How does that convey our luxury brand to our audience? We do not want to be associated with thesa types of people. How do agencies frontlining our brands on the twitter ensure that our word is spread by the right people.
Twitter = Scattergun
Luxury = Marksman
Nobody search for luxury french shoes using twitter. Those who write on designer shoes are talking direct to the designers. Only the designer copycat would use such a mass media. How does your relationship with Prada help said company?