So today is the start of London Fashion Week and although many of you may not be interested in what we will be wearing next season, you should be interested in the conversations that go on during these events via Twitter. In fact, as you are reading this, there will be someone tweeting using the hashtag #LFW, allowing anyone in the world to listen and track the ‘backchannel’ conversations going on around this event.

We all know it’s getting more challenging to find new customers so anything that can make it easier to find a ready-made list of targeted leads is gold dust. So if you’re a brand whose audience is fashion orientated, I am sure you may be interested to know that last year 31,000 users joined the London Fashion Week conversation on Twitter.

That’s a lot of fashion interested twitter users, right? So imagine if your brand had the tool to identify who they are, how influential they are, and start a conversation with them based on a shared interest.

Social Amplification

Now, if we dig a bit deeper into this niche fashion community and identify how many followers they all have collectively, you can calculate the number of people who potentially received information about the event, from people they trust enough to follow on Twitter. This number last year was an impressive 63 million – I bet this amazing metric was not used by London Fashion Week to armour their sales team when negotiating this year’s sponsorship deals.

This screenshot is from last years London Fashion Week, tracked through our back channel tracking application

It gets even better if we go one step deeper still; you can calculate the amount of times those 63 million followers were exposed to the #LFW hashtag and identify what we call the events ‘Social Amplification’ metric. This number last year was staggering and I am sure this year’s will be even bigger – again I doubt if any of the commercial teams are aware of the power the #LFW commands and how they can use it to generate new revenue.

Your Audience

The key thing to take away is that these conversations are happening with or without you getting involved. If London Fashion Week is not relevant to your audience then what is, the Tour de France, Davos, Cloud Computing, the Wedding Show, X-factor, the list is endless. More importantly instead of using technology to simply broadcast instruction and information to this audience, start looking for new engaging ways to build relationships with the community and show them you value their input.

The organisations who harness these backchannel conversations and can understand their worth will have unrivalled access to a targeted community in environments that allow them to start exploring new business models based on new, as yet, unused social metrics.

So while you are tweeting this week using a hashtag ask yourself this, who else is listening to this conversation and why?