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Have you ever seen a fast fashion company post about cheese and wondered, “What relevance could this possibly have to your brand?” Erin, Community Manager here at Puzzle, has too! Here are her thoughts on the trend.

Twitter reminds me a bit of secondary school, when everyone wore Hollister hoodies on every single non-uniform day for a whole term – and then never spoke about Hollister again. ‘Things’ on Twitter can go out of fashion before they even become trendy – and sometimes it’s great. There are so many opportunities to hop on the hypes to generate some of that sweet sweet engagement – but other times, these topical conversations can go a little bit too far.

On my daily scroll through Twitter, I started to spot a pattern. This pattern consists of largely fast-fashion companies accounts, Princess Polly’s account being an example, tweeting about things that don’t really have anything to do with their brand. We’re talking screenshots of tweets within an actual tweet, celebrity dating updates, inspirational quotes, pictures of cheese, Rihanna’s latest outfit (which are all gorgeous, by the way) and even jokes about popular TikTok audios. To me, this borders a little bit more on the chaotic-bad side of things than chaotic-good.

Cultural and social conversation topics are of course valuable to engagement, as it encourages the chatter between you and your audience to grow AND keeps you relatable, but it’s also important to create meaningful content. It’s a little bit like buying thousands upon thousands of followers on your Instagram account while still getting 4 likes per post. The numbers are there, but the meaningful engagement isn’t. While remaining trendy, cool and relevant can be invaluable to a brand – creating hollow content is just a bit… Well, hollow. Content should really have a bite to it, so that your audience actually gets something out of it. Don’t get me wrong, I love seeing pictures of beaches and cheese – but what does that have to do with clothes? Nothing, really. If I were to look at these brand’s tweets, I probably wouldn’t guess that they were clothing companies, which I think is a bit of a problem.

Of course “good” is extremely subjective, I may love a piece of content that you absolutely hate – I’m not the sole reason people make content, am I? That being said, when we’re talking about valuable content, it’s pretty easy to tell when something actually brings value to the audience or not. A lot of the content I’ve seen from these particular accounts, don’t really manage to toe the line between relatable and relevant. There are ways to work memes and topical events into your content without completely departing from what your brand is about.

A lot of this chaos is down to the ‘Gen Z intern’ approach we’re seeing pop up across many social accounts lately. Off the cuff, casual, chaotic meme-y content may very well be to blame for the extremely broad topics that many of these fashion and beauty brands choose to incorporate into their social strategy. Some brands do this very well, and it compliments their company nicely. Take Ryanair and McDonald’s as an example – who take current trends whether it be memes, hashtags, trendy phrases or even cultural touch points e.g. the Tinder Swindler inspired tweet by Ryanair linked above, and translate that into a piece of content that applies to the brand; all while remaining current and relevant to what the internet is talking about right now.

It feels as though many of these fast-fashion accounts haven’t decided whether to properly put their foot on the gas of the Gen Z tone of voice, or whether to stick to what they know. It’s just a bit confusing, and interesting that this sort of content is seen on the Twitter accounts of fast-fashion and beauty related companies. Sometimes I think it’s likely down to trends being a huge part of their products – oversized cargo trousers become trendy on a Monday, and by Wednesday these brands have a whole section dedicated to these trousers on their websites – and then sometimes I think it’s just a coincidence, and I’m spending a little too much time on the internet, thinking about things that really aren’t that deep.

Working in social, where I spend a lot of my time writing and consuming content, there’s always infinitely more value to an account that expresses their brand authentically, all while creating engaging, entertaining, relatable, and meaningful content – rather than totally unrelated things. At the end of the day, if someone follows a brand, it’s because they want to see what that brand has to say, or what they have to offer for a user’s social media experience – and recently, I’m seeing lots of accounts posting about irrelevant things that wont shift the dial. 

So, is the landscape of social changing, or is this approach to content planning… just another #trend?