Twitter's French luxury director Patrick Calmels on the platform's fashion and luxury upsurge
While owner of Tesla, billionaire Elon Musk, has announced his intention to buy Twitter, the platform continues its offensive against luxury houses. Patrick Calmels, leader and key account manager for the portal's luxury segment in France, answered five questions asked by FashionNetwork.com to provide an update on the upsurge in popularity of the fashion sector on the famous social media platform that amassed 229 million daily active users in the first quarter of 2022.
FashionNetwork.com: What is the luxury industry's relationship with Twitter?
Patrick Calmels: Luxury is one of the most important topics on Twitter. After sports and current affairs, it is the third most discussed topic in terms of unique contributors, and seventh in terms of volume. Brands come to us to engage with content and generate conversation. It's colossal. This exploded with Fashion and Haute Couture Weeks, as well as with Oscar night and the metaverse. Every day there is an opportunity to talk about luxury. The weight of the luxury conversation on the platform is extremely powerful.
FNW: How can you help the fashion and luxury industry?
PC: The platform offers the world's largest focus group. It allows people to spot changing trends and expectations. Brands like to follow these conversations to get ideas and inspiration for their collections. They also come to us to communicate their news and consult us to prepare activations and sequence them, from pre-show teasers to tweets posted after the show to keep the conversation going. Twitter Spaces, which has been offering audio conversations for the past year and a half, is also widely used by brands for live chat. We help them use the right format and correctly target the right audience through our ad spaces. You have to be very tactical.
FNW: What are the most discussed topics around a fashion show?
PC: First of all, the guests, then the location of the show, then the reactions to the creative director's statements, and finally, the collection itself. During the last Fashion Week, we counted 110 million visits. Fashion houses also use us to broadcast their fashion shows live. We have become the leading platform in terms of fashion shows' number of views. Fashion is the third largest category of our live streams, after concerts and sports. We went from 150 million views for live runway shows in 2020 to 400 million in 2021.
FNW: What advice do you give to brands?
PC: On Twitter, there is a direct, very authentic, unfiltered side to the conversation. Some brands want to interact with this audience. For example, we advised Louis Vuitton to use the South Korean pop band BTS, its ambassadors, to invite their audience directly to watch the brand's show, without it interfering with the conversation about the brand. Louis Vuitton gained a million followers in one week last September.
FNW: How has the relationship between brands and social networks evolved?
PC: Brands are using social networks increasingly more; that's where their audience is. This implies a strategy. Fashion houses must find their own tone, relevant topics on which to intervene, choose the communities they want to address. Often, their first instinct is to make the same content for different networks. Twitter users, for example, still read a lot of text, so taking care of it is just as strategically as the image or video that will accompany it.
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