Use it or lose it: how social media are saving fashion brands

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There are some luxury brands - for instance, Diane von Furstenberg, Dolce & Gabbana, Burberry, and Louis Vuitton - that are known for using social networking media such as Facebook to their advantage, and their numbers of fans (close to a million in some cases) speak for themselves. Others however, such as Fendi, Mulberry or Matthew Williamson, rank surprisingly low.

British label Mulberry shares one part of its name with social media giant Burberry, which also introduced the hugely successful community Art of the Trench, last year, but is a far cry from its competitor's reach. Even though the brand consistently ranks in the top ten of sites such as Polyvore, it only counts 9,425 fans on Facebook.

In this case, just as with Missoni, Jil Sander and Fendi, this could mean that the label either hasn't mastered platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or 'personal' blogs yet, or that it's going for a more exclusive approach to counter the increasingly democratic and open-to-all marketing currently pursued by many labels.

However, brands snubbing new media should watch out: labels that went bankrupt recently all had very low fan numbers (Escada, Lacroix, Rock and Republic), a potential sign of their failure to keep up with the new phenomenon, while those known to be the most profitable (Louis Vuitton, Burberry, or the fast fashion retailer H&M) also have the highest Facebook figures.

Here are some of the smallest fan bases of international luxury labels:

Herve Leger (9,326 fans)

Missoni (7,979 fans)

Sergio Rossi (7,902 fans)

Ermenegildo Zegna (7,269 fans)

7 for all Mankind (7,068 fans)

Fendi (5,929 fans)

Jil Sander (5,794 fans)

Comme des Garçons (3,369 fans)

Matthew Williamson (3,502 fans)

Temperley London (1,771 fans)