You may have noticed that we’ve been had a very retail focused week here! As a leading social media agency we’re particularly interested in how social is changing the way we shop.
Given this focus, here’s our pick of the top three retail stories this week:
Retailers set for £85.2bn Christmas windfall – covered on Retail Gazette publicising figures from Verdict Research. No surprises here that the figures point out that online sales are expected to rise 17.6 per cent to £8.1 billion, and this represents the largest share of growth of any sector. Maureen Hinton, lead retail analyst at Verdict, interestingly points out that “retailers such as @johnlewisretail, Marks & Spencer and Next, that provide a range of multichannel options for buying, delivery and exchange are the winners at Christmas, as well as specialists with unique ranges such as The White Company.” Nice to know we’re along the right our social shopping explosion report!
Asos launches mobile site – opening up another route to purchase for the UK’s biggest online fashion retailer this site will work across BlackBerry, Symbian, Android and iPhone operating systems, offering the full range and features of the retailer’s transactional website, such as its ’save for later’ function. A timely launch in the run up to Christmas.
Weekly Facebook fashion index: most popular retail brands of the moment – a list of the most popular retail brands on Facebook. Victoria’s Secrets, Zara and H&M are top three. We will be revealing more data regarding specific brands, from our research, so it will be interesting to compare and relate such an index to our findings.
Following on from the final story, we also spotted some interesting research from DDB on www.adweek.com. The most interesting points we took from this were:
- Over 90 per cent of Facebook users that have chosen to follow brands can be considered genuine advocates
- 92 per cent of this audience would either “certainly” or “probably” recommend companies and products they “like” on Facebook to their friends
- Fans want to feel more like a VIP who can access exclusive content and information about new products and special offers before the general public can
- 39 per cent of DDB’s interviewees said fan pages could be improved through supplying advance information and previews
Next week, we’ll be writing another post looking specifically at some of the sector findings of the research and providing some top tips on how to engage Twitter and Facebook followers.
In case you’re new to the immediate future blog, we released a major piece of research this week exploring the motivations and mindsets of consumers online (you can get a flavour for some of our findings in previous posts, Should we reward customers for social media recommendations and our introductory post, The Social Shopping Explosion).
You can download the report by visiting http://bit.ly/Social-Shopping
