How River Island uses Sprout Social to delight X fans and stay on trend

When shoppers are looking for chic, stylish and affordable fashion on the High Street in Britain, millions of them head to River Island. Headquartered in London, River Island has more than 350 stores around the world, six dedicated websites and an active X community. 

Retail is a highly competitive industry and brands have to move fast to keep up with their audiences and the trends on X. In the first half of 2020, River Island published more than 500 posts to remain a consistent presence on their audience’s timelines. 

Volume alone, however, does not necessarily mean consumers will engage. Social listening gives River Island an edge, helping their team better understand their audience so that they can produce relevant, enticing content on X and beyond.

“The conversations that take place on X are different than anywhere else, as our community uses the channel for quickly digestible, reactive, topical content,” says River Island’s Senior Social Media & Marketing Executive Kymberley Thomson. Sprout’s Social Listening gives them an opportunity to join conversations and understand emerging trends on X and beyond. Then, they use that listening data to inform their content and social strategy across all platforms. 

With Sprout Listening, River Island gathers insights from customized topics like one they created to analyze purchase intent. Any time a X user mentions River Island and keywords like, “love,” “need,” “want” and “buy,” the message is surfaced in their listening data. While Sprout’s Smart Inbox helps them engage with these messages one-to-one, Sprout Listening gives them the power to aggregate all messages that fit this criteria to spot qualitative trends, like sentiment or associated topic affinity. This helps the brand’s social team learn more about the popular products and interests among their consumers.

The beautiful thing about X is that those conversations never stop, so River Island can continue to gain new business insights and inspiration from social listening every day.