In this video, Polly Barnfield, OBE, analyses a Trafford Centre Instagram Reel promoting the opening of a new River Island store and extracts practical social‑media tactics for celebrating store or product launches. She highlights the power of short, visually‑rich reels that showcase the store’s fit‑out, events, and shopper activity to create FOMO. She stresses the importance of strong visuals, relevant hashtags, location tags, and tagging involved brands to boost discoverability. The presenter advises capturing user‑generated content—shoppers filming and photographing—to add authenticity. She then demonstrates how a social‑media dashboard can be used to monitor top‑performing posts, benchmark against other shopping centres, and track sentiment. An AI‑driven module offers suggestions for optimal hashtags, posting times, and other content tweaks. The video concludes with a call‑to‑action to use the help button for further questions.
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Today we're looking at how to celebrate the launch of a new store or product through social media. This is the Trafford Centre based up in Manchester and pretty much everybody should know who they are. They're a huge shopping center and destination and what they use social media for is sort of I guess a shop window so, so that people can see, I guess you know what stores they have, what's going on in the and attract people down. As you can see they focus quite a lot here on their event and what's happening around the center. But this is a reel that they've created for a new store. So let's take a little look at it now. Here what you can do is you can see that they have done a little reel of a brand new store that is in the center. So here you'll see it says it's river island, you know, and love them. They just got better. So basically this is a store that has upgraded and they have moved and as you can see, it's fabulous. It's not like, I guess even like, you know, your normal fit out that you would see in an average store. This is brand new. It looks sexy, it looks cool. They're showing all of, all of the different areas are showing where it is in the center. They've got the flowers, they've got the home section, they've got all the different mannequins, they've got a live DJ and basically what they're saying here is and they have a new home and it's had an upgrade but with feel good fashion design, LED interiors, premium services to give you the ultimate shopping experience. This is river island that you've never seen it before open now. So I absolutely love it because it is everything. It has given us a real vibe for what the shop is like and it gives you some really excitement and wanted to go down. You see people taking videos, you see people taking pictures, which gives you that kind of fear of missing out. So the reel itself is basically just a bunch of little videos that have all been clipped together. So it's just such a lovely idea. And then when you actually go into it and they've done some great hashtags, which means again, anyone who's looking for style inspiration for summer is going to be interested in that. It's in open now and it's given us the information on exactly where it is as well and of course they've tagged them in. So essentially if you're looking for inspiration on how to create new, new store openings, new product openings and looking for some content. And this is exactly what you do. You go down there, you make it look fun, you make it look busy, you show people interacting with it, you show all the main products, everything around it, put it all together in a reel and, and make sure that you tag in anybody that's involved as well. Now if I was traffic sensor, one of the things that I'd want to be doing is making sure that I was keeping on top of my social media. So I would go to maybe and I would be checking out my dashboard. Now, on the dashboard, they can do everything from here. They would have themselves and that would be their best post in the last week. And then they can compare themselves with literally any other shopping center. So they might choose Metro center, they might choose Westfield, whoever they, whoever they want. And then they can start comparing and contrasting, they can start to look at each other's stats and they can see what works for them. They can start to see, even you can see sentiment. They can see how people feel about them. And it's just a really, really good way of them being able to benchmark what they do. And there's a new added in section which is all AI inspired. This is everything they can do. Like, you know, what hashtag should I be using, what's the best time for us to post, etc. Now, as always, if you've got any questions at all, click on the little blue button. We love to help.
