The Swedish clothing retailer H&M reached 100,000 followers on Twitter this week, which is a first for a Swedish company. But that is just for its main account @hm. In fact, H&M is followed by twice as many, if you combine the number of users that follow the company’s 28 Twitter accounts: in total 201,000.
It is very interesting to study H&M’s strategy, to complement a global account with accounts for local markets and that they are branded in a similar fashion (@hm plus country). The company today has one global account with 101,000 followers (@hm), one old general news account that is not used any longer (@HM_News) and 26 geographic accounts (25 countries and one province – Quebec in Canada). To see a full list of accounts, see this list of H&M on Twitter.
Top ten H&M accounts (by number of followers):
- @hm – 101,000
- @hmusa – 34,500
- @hmdeutschland – 11,400
- @hmunitedkingdom – 10,800
- @hmcanada – 9,800
- @hmespana – 7,200
- @hmjapan – 5,000
- @HM_News (no longer in use) – 4,800
- @hmfrance – 2,700
- @hmsouthkorea – 2,600
If we compare the countries were H&M has stores and rank them by sales (for stats, see this pdf) we see that Germany, France, USA and the UK are the company’s biggest markets (left column below). But the company has most followers in USA, Germany, UK and Canada (right column below). Switzerland is another top market but H&M does not have a specific Swiss Twitter account yet (Update: there is a Swiss account at @hmsuisse, but it is not yet active). South Korea is one of H&M’s smallest markets, but that local account has already attracted 2,600 followers.
With this strategy H&M is able to reach more than 200,000 people on Twitter, many of them in their local language. All country accounts are in local language except the accounts from the Middle East and Turkey. Update: @hmturkyie is in fact in Turkish.
