Six Social Sites Every Fashion Marketer Should Know

For nearly 100 years, the fashion industry was controlled by retailers, who decided what items from the upcoming collections are most relevant to their customer base. Today this is no longer the case – this is another proof that clarifies the importance of social media for today’s marketers.

I have been already blogging about the fact that social media has deconstructed traditional communication between retailer and consumers. Today a designer can easily communicate with her/his audience on a real-time basis through social media channels such as Facebook, Twitter, Youtube Fansites etc. If designers do not join the online conversation with their audience, they will have a hard time to stay relevant. But there is one big problem in the fashion industry associated with that. While a designer doesn’t want to make her/his new clothes easily available in order to remain exclusive, he/she doesn’t want to be forgotten. Therefore, a marketer in fashion has to find the fine line between those two extremes.

Advertising Age has recently published the six social sites that every fashion marketer should know in order to keep up with the online discussions:


• Shopflick
• Us Trendy
• StyleCaster
• Sense of Fashion
• Est. Today
• Style Hop

I have decided to look into each of these over the next couple of weeks to see how useful they really are. Are these sites helpful for listening and engaging with your customer base?

Please stay with me.

Brand Republic: Being a fan on facebook

Although I have been blogging before about how useful facebook can be for companies, i have found some research that is claiming the opposite. Brand Republic - a market-leading website for the online advertising, marketing, media and PR sectors - has recently done some street interviews in the UK asking people about their opinion and experience with fan sites on facebook.

These are the snapshots of the interviews:



According to this study people seem not to be really interested in becoming a fan of brands on facebook. These interviews were of course only made with a small group of selected people, so that one might argue that the results are not representative. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a majority of Facebook users (including me) don't see the benefit of becoming a fan of most of the brands on Facebook. This issue goes back to one of my previous postings about Victoria's Secret and Facebook. Facebook is only an effective marketing tool if the company finds a way to differentiate itself from its competitors on Facebook and clearly shows its customers the benefits of being their 'Facebook fan'.

But aren't companies dealing with the same issues in the offline marketing world too??! I think that with some creativity there are many ways to use Facebook to your advantage!