I thought I would take the opportunity to explain to our readers and the various agencies and companies how we utilise the internet and social media platforms to market the Luxurious Magazine brand around the world and to highlight some of the clever ways that businesses use statistics to pull the wool over your eyes.
The web site
Obviously, we have our main website (luxuriousmagazine.com), one of the most popular luxury websites in the world. Most months we receive in excess of 150,000 unique visitors, this does not include repeat visitors, so you can see that our general audience is pretty large.
One thing that I need to keep repeating to people is you must realise that we are a magazine sat squarely within a niche market sector – ‘high end luxury’, so comparisons with mainstream non-market-specific publications is not like for like.
However, when you understand that we are only a niche market publication and then look at our audience, this is where we excel. You see, in many aspects, we do compete directly with mainstream generic publications and, in some areas, exceed their achievements.
There are many factors that contribute to our online success, the primary one is, for the majority of the world we’re the leader for the phrase ‘Luxury Magazine’. Again, we are also usually number one for the phrases ‘Online Luxury Magazine’ and ‘Digital Luxury Magazine’.
Some online and digital publications make such claims that they are the best, number one or leading this or that, often nowhere to be found on the internet, sometimes using an Alexa Ranking as a justification. Alexa provides traffic data, global rankings and other information on 30 million websites and claims that 6 million people visit its website monthly.
However, as most internet ‘savvy’ people know, Alexa is a useful tool, but rankings can easily be manipulated by any company trying to promote themself by having the Alexa toolbar on their system, as data is only recorded from those with the toolbar installed.
Our Magazines
We also have our digital magazines, currently an International version and a European version are available. These magazines are free to read and download, the primary platforms we use are Issuu.com – the world largest digital publishing platform and an official partner of ours, and luxuriousmagazine.net where have the same magazine but on a different software platform.
We have also placed the magazine on the HP MagCloud platform and again made the magazine free to read and download. The magazine has been designed to be read on any device, we also pay particular attention to ensure the editorial content as easy to read as possible.
Again, people ask for exact readership figures, and once more, I have to be honest and arm people with the information and tools to let them make their own judgement. I would advise people who are interested in working with Luxurious Magazine to go somewhere like Issuu, look at the stats on our magazine and compare it with others; add to this, during a four-week period over December and January 2012/2013, we were informed that in excess of 50 file sharing sites around the world had luxurious magazine available to download ‘for free’, amazing when you consider it is free in the first place and making readership figures impossible for us to calculate.
The Luxurious Magazine App
Social Media is a major component of our success; some platforms work better for us than others. The most popular platform we use is our own Luxurious Magazine Free App (free to download from the App Store). This allows people with the app installed to get instant news updates as they become available.
The Luxurious Magazine app has proven to be spectacularly popular, with thousands of people around the world using it each day.
Facebook
While on the subject of social media, people sometimes remark that compared to some organisations we have a relatively small following on Facebook, the reason for this is that we don’t play the ‘get the numbers game’, we can, but we won’t.
For us and to many advertising professionals, the important figure is the ‘People talking about’; for example, one of the major travel groups I work with has about 40 times more ‘Likes’ than we do and virtually the same amount of people talking about their page.
So, next time you go to a Facebook page, don’t just look at the number of likes that could be generated in any number of ways, including ‘like our page to enter a competition’ or even paying for Facebook likes; look at the number of people talking about it, this provides a true indication of engagement and popularity.
With Facebook, we have found it too easy for people to ‘like’ a page, whether intentionally or not, and quite often, they are never heard from again; some companies encourage you to like their Facebook page on their website, all in the attempt to appear more popular, once again I would ask you to have a look at the ‘talking about’ number, it is a huge eye opener and something that will probably make you go Ohhhh.
Google Plus
On Google Plus (the big rival to Facebook), we have a relatively large page following that actively engages with us on a daily basis.
Our following on the Luxurious Magazine page is larger than that of many global luxury brands and world-renowned organisations. Personally, we find Google Plus to be easier to use than Facebook to ascertain a brand’s popularity.
The reason behind this is you can clearly see the number of people following a page, and we feel it is simpler for people to see what geographical areas of the world our ‘page followers’ come from.
Another big benefit for us using Google Plus is the simple way we can monitor the impact and sharing of our content, quite often we will post an article (on average we post 15 articles a day on Google Plus) and this will be shared by our page followers in some cases 30+ times.
This might not seem like a lot, but when you consider that the average person on Google Plus probably has a Circle of between 300 and 1000 people, with many of our page followers having 5,000+ in their profile circles, you can now see how one article can reach tens of thousands of people within a few hours.
You should also be aware of the differences between Profiles and Brand/Business Pages:
- Pages can’t add people to circles until the page is added first or mentioned.
- Pages can be made for a variety of different entities, whereas profiles can only be made for people.
- Pages can have multiple administrators.
- Pages have the +1 button.
- Pages can’t +1 other pages, nor can they +1 stuff on the Web. (But like profiles, they can +1 inside Google+.).
- Pages don’t have the option to share to ‘Extended circles’.
So, in simple terms, building large social circles via a Profile is simple, you can add ready made circles consisting of hundreds of people at the press of a button. Building a good-sized audience on a brand page like the Luxurious Magazine page is much harder.
We also actively engage with people on Pinterest, Linkedin and, to a lesser degree, Twitter.
Video Channels
Video is another important part in bringing Luxurious Magazine to every part of the world, our Youtube Channel has had in excess of 500,000 video views in just over 12 months, way in excess of our competitors.
When you think about that figure, it’s more than the total population of some small countries that have watched our videos for over a year.
At least one of our videos is watched somewhere around the world every minute of the day. This is also backed up by luxuriousmagazine.tv, our own hosted video channel. We don’t just post videos provided by the luxury brands, we also film produce and edit our own videos including the Luxurious Magazine Luxury Travel Show, a first-hand honest travel review show.
I hope that those who know us and have read our online media pack will see that we always try to be as open and transparent as possible; this is one of the reasons that I decided to write this, in the hope that it provides some clarity and gives you some useful knowledge to ascertain who truly is popular and who may be using some marketing ‘slight of hand’ to try to get your hard earned advertising budget.
Hopefully you’ve found this article informative and you will be encouraged to visit our channels, remember, look at the statistics yourself, do direct like-for-like comparisons and NEVER take what someone tells you at ‘Face Value’.
If someone claims to have a show that’s on TV somewhere, get proof, check out the independent statistics, visit their own video channel and check the numbers; if a magazine prints xxx amount of magazines and distributes them for free, it doesn’t necessarily mean that people read them – do you?
If someone claims to be the best at this or the number one at that, let them prove this to you via independent statistics. If they can provide this, and you’re satisfied then I’m happy, this means that what I have written has been taken on–board and you’ve done your research.
You must be logged in to post a comment.