[An Inside Facebook post]
Women make up the majority of Facebook users and their presence on the social network has not gone unnoticed by department stores, who have set up shop on Facebook (literally, in some cases) in an effort to foment a relationship with their customers as fans. We recently reported that women in the U.S. constituted over 56% of the overall Facebook population, part of a longtime trend, especially women between 26 and 44 who are more likely to have disposable income to spend and are likely to spend it on themselves.
We looked at a total of seven department stores that seemed to be focusing most, if not all, their efforts on women: Bloomingdale’s had about 21,000 fans and Macy’s had 256,000 or so (they’re owned by the same company), Dillard’s with under 19,000 fans, JC Penney with almost 784,000 fans, Kohl’s had over 952,000 fans, Nordstrom with almost 55,000 and Sears with more than 158,000 fans.
Most of the Pages: actively updated their status with store deals, allowed fans to post to the Wall (except Sears) and were very responsive to posts/comments. In terms of media, they featured a lot of photo albums, mostly of merchandise, a few dozen videos, links to their web sites. They highlighted specials in some way — either with a tab, a box or an application. Only a few used discussion boards, events or notes frequently but all of them linked to Facebook from their web sites (and vise versa on Facebook) and were pretty active about talking back to the customers who posted/commented on their Walls. Dillard’s included a full-service store on their Facebook Page…[See the full post here]
