Facebook: the Wall Street of Fashion

As Heidi Klum says on Project Runway, in fashion one day you are in and the next you are out.

The hottest trend right now for the fashion industry and luxury brands is social media and online video, as means of communication for their new campaigns.

The latest Fashion Week in New York marked a turning point for the world of fashion, with designers like Marc Jacobs, Tommy Hilfiger and Rodarte live streaming their shows and a glamorous Fashion Blog Conference by Independent Fashion Bloggers stealing the spotlight from the red carpet. Facebook lists today more than 500 official pages for fashion brands that seem to invest more day by day in social media for a better understanding of their clients.

Stylophane a well known digital marketing firm, based in San Francisco has launched Stylophane Facebook Fashion Index, which tracks online brand popularity based on the number of their fans on Facebook. The brands are divided into four categories: Platinum for having more than 100,000 fans, Gold for 10,000 – 100,000 fans, Silver for 1,000 – 10,000 and Bronze for 10 – 1,000 fans. There are also available graphs to help visualize the growth of a particular brand on Facebook. For instance Menswear designer Perry Ellis grew his fan base by 357.35%, from less than 3000 to 11,100 fans within a month.

The rankings are updated daily and right now the top ten brands of Facebook are dominated by sportswear labels like Adidas, in number one with 2,370,312 fans, Converse (number two) and Nike (number three). It’s not until number seven, where lands Burberry, that there is a high-end brand entry, highlighting the fact that the more luxurious brands were the slowest in adjusting in the world of social media.

Alex Mendoza, managing partner of Stylophane, told the Los Angeles 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 hope the Fashion Index will be soon enriched with more features, like a way to compare the growth between brands, present the results per product (ex. top in shoes or top in accessories) and of course some social tools or a widget to share the graphs or rankings you are interested in.

Fashion Industry is one of the most fast paced industries along with tech industry, will it be able to keep up and walk down the global runway of Social Media without falling off? Time to see what brands will update their “status” on Twitter, Facebook and maybe soon Buzz.