Fashion Foundry Social Media Workshops

The Fashion Foundry is a new incubator organisation for emerging Scottish fashion designers, by the Cultural Enterprise Office & Creative Scotland. I found out about this wonderful initiative, that involves studio and manufacturing space, one to one mentoring and incredible business opportunities, through my friend and colleague at The Scottish Design Exchange,  Piotr Pyrchala, fashion designer behind the contemporary womenswear brand Birds of Prayers, who is now part of the elite group of five young  creative talents from across Scotland receiving bespoke training and support from the Fashion Foundry (read about the launch event here!).

Last week I attended their first public workshop, Social Media For International Audiences , in collaboration with Made Brave, a brand-led digital creative agency,  held at the wonderful ISO Design in Glasgow.

What I learned (in a nutshell!)Essentially, the key to cracking your social media is creating and maintaining a strong, recognisable and memorable brand identity, whether this means having an Intagram Theme (always using the same layout  or filter or frame or colour pallette in your photos), developing a unique tone of voice in your tweets, showing behind-the scenes with live videos on Facebook or using the new Instagram stories. Another really important point is adding a narrative when sharing from other accounts, and when commenting on others' posts, make sure to really add something to the conversation, rather than a one-word response or simple emoji. In addition, we talked as a group about targeting the right audiences online, analysing your online data (e.g.. views, reach, readers),  and encouraging user-generated content using polls, surveys, open questions, hashtag campaigns and more- any real-time customer feedback is GOLD.  Finally, we learnt about the measurable benefits of collaboration, for example Instagram take overs, becoming a brand ambassador, and refining your feeds to fit with your brand values.