Top online fashion retailers: ASOS tops social media, but drops in search

According to marketing agency Greenlight’s ‘Fashion Sector Report May 2010’, Womenswear continued to dominate consumer online fashion searches, accounting for 67% of searches, an increase of 16% since Greenlight’s previous report in February.

Menswear accounted for 1.1 million searches. The report also reveals ASOS was the most followed fashion brand in social media. However, in search, it lost 28% visibility on February levels.

To gauge social media interaction with brands, Greenlight monitored the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the top 15 brands (see table 1) in its integrated search league table (see table 2).

It ranked the brands based on the cumulative value of their ‘fans’ and ‘followers’, a score termed the Greenlight Social Media Popularity Index (SMPI).

Greenlight further analysed the proactivity of brands by considering the number of ‘posts’ and ‘tweets’ they produced for consumers to interact with in May. It reveals:

• ASOS was the most followed fashion brand in social media, with a combined following of nearly 300,000 on Facebook and Twitter. Interestingly, on Twitter it also had an additional 2,506 followers on its ASOS_Dashboard account (which displays live updates on postal orders) and 3,132 following its customer service account: ASOS_HeretoHelp
• MarksandSpencer was the most interactive brand. It cumulatively produced 774 ‘posts’ and ‘tweets’ in May
• Some fashion brands utilised social networking relatively little, such as MissSelfridge which produced a total of just 41 ‘posts’ and ‘tweets’ in May, and MillwardBrown, which currently does not have official Facebook or Twitter accounts
• Brands utilised social media pages for multiple purposes; for example, MarksandSpencer, Very and Littlewoods not only generated press releases but also acted as a customer service contact by directly answering consumer queries and complaints on their official Facebook pages, whilst Lipsy utilised Facebook to promote its competition: ‘Lipsy Wall of Fame’.

 Top 5 of 15 most visible fashion brands in social media, UK

Source: Greenlight

Greenlight also determined the best positioned, and hence most visible fashion websites in natural* and paid search** which represents their visibility to the 9.7 million searches in May. The results show:

• Debenhams was the most visible website in natural search, achieving 52% visibility. This was attained through ranking at position one for 23 keywords and  ranking high on Google for high volume driving terms, such as featuring at position two for the keyword ‘Dresses’
• ASOS followed with 41% visibility. However, since Greenlight’s previous report it lost 28% visibility almost solely due to the fact that it ranked at position one for the term ‘Dresses’ in February, yet featured at position 12 for this keyword in May
• Peacocks ranked at position 13, having featured outside of the top 60 websites in Greenlight’s February report
• Very was the most visible advertiser in paid search, across all keywords. It achieved 53% visibility, a 14% increase on February. It was also the most visible advertiser for womenswear, attaining 76% visibility
• JohnLewis increased its share of voice in paid search by 32% since February, which saw it ascend Greenlights league table from position 13 to three

Top 10 of the 60 most visible Fashion websites in both in natural and paid search, UK

Source: Greenlight

Source: http://www.greenlightsearch.com/knowledge/sector-reports/

www.greenlightsearch.com

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