An analysis of the most successful publishers of fashion content on Facebook and Twitter.
Following our look at social engagement for politics publishers last week, this week we’re focusing on fashion publishers. We’ve covered engagement around fashion content on the blog before, with specific looks at the importance of influencer marketing and Instagram engagement. For this blog however, we looked at social shares of fashion content published to a domain.
We pulled a list of the biggest stories from NewsWhip Spike’s fashion category for the period between May 20th and June 20th. This yielded some 2,979 stories from 40 publishers. We then input the publisher domains into NewsWhip Analytics to get more in-depth data on social shares. For a closer look at the biggest fashion content in real-time, trial Spike for free now.
Based on this data, here are the top ten fashion publishers for this period, based on cumulative Facebook and Twitter scores:
This ranking yields an interesting mixture of names. While dedicated fashion publishers such as Vogue and InStyle slot comfortably into the top 10, the list also includes both niche and more general publishers.
HelloGiggles is the top publisher of fashion content for this period with a total of 2.8 million engagements on Facebook and Twitter. This gives it a healthy lead over second-placed High Snobiety, which earned 1.07 million engagements in the same time frame.
The success of HelloGiggles, combined with the appearance of Refinery29, illustrates the reach that many female-focused publishers have on social; particularly those which target a younger audience. Much of HelloGiggles’ content is aimed at younger women and girls, and its success – combined with that of Teen Vogue this period – highlights the influence younger female social audiences have for many publishers.
Among the other names in the list, New York Magazine is a broader publisher, covering politics, entertainment and lifestyle issues as well as fashion. It earned 1.05 million engagements from fashion content this period, indicating that its coverage of this area has a certain prestige. Similarly, the Huffington Post and MTV cover a wide range of topics, but saw significant engagement from fashion coverage in the period we looked at.
Compared to other publishers listed here, Sole Collector is more niche, covering trends in footwear. However, this targeted approach earns dividends – it’s the fifth most successful publisher this period with 747,729 engagements, and Sole Collector frequently appears among the top results in Spike’s fashion category.
Footwear as a niche area of fashion coverage tends to generate plenty of activity on social. In addition to Sole Collector, a number of other footwear-focused sites (such as Sneaker News and Nice Kicks) appear in the list of successful publishers this month. Many of these focus heavily on footwear for sports and activities, suggesting strong overlap between sports and fashion content.
Some of the more well-known fashion publishers, such as Elle, Marie Claire, Cosmopolitan and Nylon, don’t appear in the top 10 for this period. That said, it’s worth noting that their engagement figures aren’t much lower than those which did appear in the upper half of the ranking. Figures declined very gradually both within and outside the top 10, meaning many publishing names are closely matched. These figures are, furthermore, close enough to shift easily month-on-month, meaning the list may look very different if compiled in a different period.
Engagement
Overall, engagement isn’t particularly high. Compared to the figures we’ve seen in other publisher rankings, engagement levels are lower in range and volume. Figures in this ranking range from the low thousands to just under 3 million. This is much lower than the engagement figures we saw around fashion labels themselves earlier this month. It’s also low when compared with Instagram engagement for publishers and influencers. Indeed, major fashion publications saw over a million engagements in the five-day period of New York Fashion Week alone, compared to the figures generated across a 30-day period here.
This would seem to suggest that engagement around fashion content is much more prosperous on visual platforms like Instagram and Pinterest than Facebook and Twitter. Given the strong visual appeal of such content, imagery alone is often sufficient to elicit an enthusiastic response from users, even without an accompanying feature. Our analysis of activity during Fashion Week indicated that many publishers used Instagram to link back to gallery features on their main website, highlighting the lure of strong visuals for fashion-savvy users.
Average engagement
As in other rankings of publishers on social, average engagements differed hugely across the board, and saw a significant re-ordering of the list. Many of the more highly-ranked publishers posted fewer pieces of content.
Notably, Lenny Letter published only one piece of fashion content this period. This was however sufficient to earn it 26,486 total engagements, placing it 37th overall but first for average engagement. The story in question focused on the makeup-free movement and was authored by musician Alicia Keys. The combination of name recognition and a strong subscriber base means this piece benefited from a large audience, but the volume of engagements is nevertheless impressive when compared with other publishers.
Incidentally, Disney was the next most successful publisher based on average engagements. It earned an average of 5,002 interactions on Facebook and Twitter from 44 pieces of content. Ranked by this metric, Seventeen and Cosmopolitan also enter the top ten. These two publishers posted 33 and 77 stories respectively. For Seventeen, each of those stories yielded an average of 2,062 interactions, and for Cosmopolitan each story earned about 1,835 interactions.
This makes for an interesting contrast with Teen Vogue, which with 227 stories was one of the more active publishers in this period. It earned 1,881 engagements on average to place 7th in this list. HelloGiggles, the most successful publisher overall, generated its 2.8 million engagements from a huge amount of content – some 1,814 articles in total. This means it places 10th by this metric.
Top stories
The top stories for this period yielded an interesting mixture of topics and themes. Interestingly, while many stories focused exclusively on fashion and trends, areas such as current affairs and politics also featured prominently in many articles.
Looking at strictly fashion coverage, these were the biggest stories for this period:
Alicia Keys’ post for Lenny Letter was also covered in The Huffington Post, earning it over 75,000 engagements and making it the most successful piece of this period. The story of a little girl dressing as a hot dog to attend “Princess Day” at her dance class earned widespread coverage, with New York Magazine’s coverage earning over 55 and a half thousand engagements.
Marie Claire’s article on Chanel as an investment and Refinery29’s feature on a Disney-themed Coach collection represent more conventional fashion pieces. Interestingly, the latter piece is mostly a gallery of images with little accompanying text. This and other gallery pieces – such as Essence’s piece on Sasha Obama’s wardrobe – drove significant sharing on Facebook and Twitter, highlighting the lure visuals alone have for many social users.
The biggest stories this period also showcased the overlap between fashion coverage and other topics. Stories categorised as fashion due to the publisher (for example, Vogue) nevertheless covered a wide range of areas.
The success of such pieces shows that for even conventional fashion publishers, there is strong value to be derived from covering other areas directly relevant to readers, such as politics and lifestyle. As an example, a Vogue piece on gun violence authored by Gabrielle Giffords generated over 22,000 engagements in total. Similarly, a piece on Hillary Clinton published in The Guardian drove some 33,558 interactions on Facebook and Twitter.
The full list of the top 25 publishers is below.
