Five fashion brands boosting traffic with Facebook apps

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Posted 06 June 2012 13:40pm by David Moth with 0 comments

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Pinterest's rise from niche website to social powerhouse has been built largely on the back of fashion and lifestyle users.

And we've seen a few case studies recently that suggest Pinterest users are worth more to e-commerce sites than visitors from Twitter or Facebook.

Perhaps to reassert its authority as the number one social network, Facebook has released stats to show that its platform is just as popular with "shopaholics and fashionistas."

A developer blog post by Austin Haugen flags up five examples of fashion brands that have increased traffic and mobile installs through the use of Open Graph apps.

Fab

Daily design app Fab increased membership from 1.8m to more than 4.5m since launching with Open Graph in January.

Furthermore, 20%-40% of its daily traffic comes from Facebook.

Pose

Style app Pose has seen a tenfold increase in daily signups for its mobile app and website since launching with Open Graph.

Its users view 40m poses each month, up from less than 10m prior to Open Graph launch.

Giantnerd 

Since integrating with Open Graph the outdoor goods retailer has seen traffic from Facebook increase 214%. 

Giantnerd has also found that new users signing up from Facebook has increased 69%, and Facebook-connected users have an 18% higher average order value than the site average. 

Fashiolista 

The European style inspiration company saw a 200% increase in traffic from Facebook after the first month of using Open Graph. This increased to almost 300% over the following months. 

Recently, almost a third of total daily new registers have been coming from Open Graph.

Lyst 

London-based social shopping site Lyst saw its user base double and traffic more than double since launching with Open Graph. 

People coming from Facebook to Lyst spend 50% more time on the site than other users, and more sales come through Facebook than all other social media sources combined.

Best practice tips

While these are interesting success stories, it obviously doesn't mean that all fashion apps will automatically enjoy similar success.

It's also important to note that we've been given percentages rather than actual figures for a lot of the statistics, so it's unclear exactly how much traffic Facebook is driving to the sites.

Facebook has recently been busy promoting the use of Open Graph apps as a way of "closing the viral loop" to increase traffic and user engagement.

And Econsultancy's Facebook Pages for Business Best Practice Guide gives further details on how to create attractive brand pages and apps.

Haugen also gave three best practice tips for driving user engagement with timeline apps:

• Use a call to action: this will encourage people to add the app and share it with friends. Fab offered a limited time, promotional credit to drive sign ups and now displays images of the user's friends during sign up to increase personalisation.
• Create multiple action types: experiment with different actions for each point of the buying journey to aid product discovery and purchase. These need to be relevant for each community and encourage sharing.
• Use object types to create categories: create objects for categories that allow users to compile timeline aggregations. This could be a list for 'Most loved brands' or Top loved style items.'