A new index that tracks the popularity of fashion brands on Facebook has joined the growing number of social media marketing and measurement tools. Called the Stylophane Facebook Fashion Index, it was developed by Stylophane e-commerce provider, which also tracks the most popular brands on Facebook each month.
Launched last week, the Fashion Index updates daily and shows the percentage increase or decrease in the number of fans for a particular fashion brand, writes the Los Angeles Times.
Who's Growing
For instance, at the beginning of February Adidas has the most Facebook fans at 2,338,393, and clothing designer Grace Sun grew its fan base by the largest percentage - 38.95% to 132 fans within a month.
Alex Mendoza, managing partner of Stylophane, tells the Times that the firm decided to develop the index after they looked at more than 1,000 brands and found that only about 40% of them had a company Facebook page. "I think that Facebook is going to end up being the biggest thing since Google when it comes to online advertising. And this shows pretty quickly which companies are taking Facebook seriously."
Vitrue
Stylophane Facebook Fashion Index joins a growing number of such indexes and tools designed to make the huge amount of data available on social media manageable for marketers. Another example is Vitrue, which also calculates a similar index. Called the Vitrue 100, it captures each day various online conversations from status updates to multi-dimensional video sites of the more 2,000 brands on the social web.
At the end of last year it found that the top ten brands mentioned on social media in 2009 were, in order, iPhone, Disney, CNN, MTV, NBA, iTunes, Wii, Apple, Xbox and Nike.
No Sentiment
The algorithm used by Vitrue captures only mentions of a phrase, however - it doesn't distinguish between positive and negative comments. (via Penton Insight). "What we're measuring here is the share of voice that a brand has in social media at a given time," says Reggie Bradford, Vitrue CEO. "The algorithm doesn't measure sentiment, so we don't capture 'iPhone sucks' versus 'iPhone rules.'"
