Battle of the Instagram Brands: @Burberry versus @Mango

In recent years, Instagram has become a powerful marketing tool for fashion, footwear and accessory companies. The hashtag #fashion has registered over 232 million publications. And #moda, its equivalent in Spanish, has exceeded 20 million too. Its visual appeal and powerful potential to generate interactions has already helped brands, such as Prada, to gain more followers in Instagram than in Facebook (6.1 million Instagram followers versus 5.4 million on Facebook).

But how are you using your Instagram account? What has worked well for you? To explore this social media platform, I worked with Pirendo for a month to analyze two leading fashion brands whose communities on Instagram are very powerful, but are still smaller than on Facebook. The comparison was made between one British and one Spanish company: Burberry versus Mango.

Attracting New Followers

With 5.2 million followers on Instagram, Burberry outperforms Mango’s 3.6 million Instagram followers. Not only that, Burberry has shown a greater ability to to gain followers. In the last month, the brand has gained a 6.32% increase in following, compared to the 5.01% increase for Mango. It is true, however, that the boost to this growth has been registered at the same time that Burberry launched a follow up action to gain more than 300 users last November 2. What a coincidence, right?

What is also of significant note is that neither of the two brands have lost any fans in the last month. Their Instagram followers are faithful.

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The Burberry Community on Instagram

Type of publications and interaction

In all aspects, Burberry proves to be a much more active brand than Mango. They also seem to have a higher interaction rate as reflected by their 260.93 Conversion Rate. This was a result of one month’s worth of publications composed of 87 posts which have garnered 22,701 comments and 3.7 million “Likes”. Although majority of their posts were images (74 photos in total), Burberry also included videos (13 videos in the same month) in their marketing strategy.

Meanwhile, Mango only released 31 posts within the same period. Their engagement was obviously lower at 2,692 comments and just over a million “Likes”. This resulted in a 86.84 Conversion Rate. Of the 31 publications, only two were videos.

As for the filters, Mango prefers not to use any of them. My guess is, they operate with the belief, “Why complicate things?”. Burberry has been seen to experiment with filters like Ludwig, Clarendon, Juno and Cream. It shows a bit more work put into their images before they are actually posted.

Evolution of publications

Burberry’s activity on Instagram highlights November 3 as the peak of their online presence. That day, Burberry presented their new Christmas campaign, a tribute to the opening scene of the film “Billy Elliot”. In this adaptation, Burberry assembled an all-star British cast including Romeo Beckham, Naomi Campbell and Sir Elton John. In fact, @iamnaomicampbell and @eltonjohn were among the most cited users by Burberry for that month. Both attended the gala with other celebrities who worked with Burberry for the Instagram campaign. This was the day that Burberry registered the highest number of interactions, which just goes to show that the strategy of collaborating with influencers has paid off at all levels. Their massive follow up efforts the day before have also been justified, and we now understand why they did so.

Mango, on the other hand, maintained a more stable activity pattern throughout the month, with the exception of November 18. That particular day stood out as the day Mango presented their “Special Events Collection”. It was a more modest campaign, mainly focused on the presentation of their products. As expected, it created a much smaller buzz and fewer interactions.

But aside from these mentioned days, what is their preferred day to publish? Surprisingly, both brands agree that Tuesday is best day to concentrate your posts!

The hashtag as a marketing tool

Burberry seems to know more about the use of hashtags. Among the hashtags they used in the last month, #artofthetrench and #aott have managed to get their Instagram followers spreading the word about Burberry trench coats. After all, trenches are the emblem of the house.

Mango, however, has been monothematic : #mango is their most repeated hashtag.

As you dive deeper into Instagram, you’ll soon see that focusing on hashtags or the quality of your photos are good practices. But a great strategy could be the difference between stuck at 400 followers and moving past 5,000 followers. If you are interested in soaring way past 5,000 followers and reaching 30,000 followers in under a year, try signing up for a free trial of our Instagram growth service at Simplygram.