Background

Swedish-based H&M is a global fashion retailer offering trendy clothes for the whole family. With around 2,500 stores spread across 44 markets, the company engages in traditional forms of marketing and integrates its social media with other communication activities. An early adopter of Google+, today the company has more followers on the platform than any other retail brand - a total of over 940,000 followers. Miriam Tappert, Global Social Media Manager at H&M, explains that the objectives for setting up the brand's Google+ page were simple: "To be where our customers are, have a dialogue and share the latest fashion."

Using Google+ as a source for inspiration and exclusivity

"At Google+ we have chosen to focus on inspiration," says Miriam. "Nice images, films, and, of course, a lot of fashion." H&M uses video and photos frequently in posts, as visuals are an effective way to promote fashion and lifestyle. Depictions of people wearing H&M clothes appear along with captions plus links enabling visitors to quickly click to purchase the clothing being displayed.

"We think it is important to be active and post news every day, just as in our other social media channels," Miriam continues, "and we are also careful to make sure that what we publish is relevant to our followers." With its emphasis on trend-led and up-to-the-minute fashion, H&M's Google+ page presents artistic, aesthetically pleasing content and often includes celebrities.

Instead of replicating the experience of shopping in the store or on the website, the page supplies a steady stream of interactive content tailored specifically to the Google+ audience. "We want our followers on Google+ to feel that what they get is unique," Miriam says. H&M publishes a captivating range of exclusive collection previews and contests through Google+, as well as offering access to behind the scenes footage - like a Vogue editor preparing for an H&M
photo shoot.

All of this has resulted in great levels of engagement from fans Results with the following results so far:

• Average number of +1's per post: 72
• Average number of reshares per post: 11
• Average number of comments per post: 22

Their most popular posts are the ones with for their top collections with Beckham, Versace and Marni.

Using ripples to analyse trendsetting

H&M has a very high rate of shared posts. Their team can "View Ripples" to see who has shared content and what was said. In this way, the ripples feature lets H&M see how posts spread across Google+, who's sharing and resharing the content and whose opinions matter. The feature can be used to identify influencers and see how communities form around content. The larger the circles in ripples, the larger the reach they might have. Here is an example of how H&M kept close track of the top influencers for H&M's David Beckham underwear collection.

[[quote]]

Using social extensions to integrate social strategy into search

Another feature H&M uses are social extensions in its AdWords advertising. "That our page is highly integrated with search is very interesting," Miriam says. Social extensions help the company obtain a higher number of brand recommendations, +1's and direct traffic to their Google+ page, effectively increasing their number of followers by doing so. On average H&M has achieved a 22% CTR uplift on all their AdWords campaigns thanks to implementing social extensions.

*The CTR uplift calculation of Social extensions is based on a week over week comparison of the same campaigns. With this methodology, some extraneous factors may impact the numbers slightly, but in all cases we attempted to correct for those factors.