Paul Godbold Explains How Important Social Media is to Luxurious Magazine

People sometimes question the value of Google Plus to a brand, citing Facebook as the market leader. Whether accurate or not, recent press seems to indicate the audience sizes of these two platforms are going in opposite directions, with Google Plus increasing its market share probably helped by the recent integration of Google Search, Google Plus and YouTube etc. into one platform. From what we understand, this integration feeds off each of the components increasing search visibility (look up Google Authorship).

I really do believe that all brands, whether attached to the luxury industry or not must be on and using this integrated Google platform to its fullest. Those of you that are not concentrating now on the Google products may find yourself left out in the cold, I want you to imagine having a brand that is far less visible on Google, think how this will impact on your business?

Luxurious Magazine uses social media to increase brand awareness around the world, we can’t be the best or the most popular on Facebook as we started our page much later than most others (less than two years ago) and our range of articles is so diverse that it just doesn’t work well for us or the audience we have. Personally, I have a problem with the figures shown on Facebook business pages because, as much as the company tries to prevent this, they can still be manipulated i.e. buying followers and I don’t agree with using ‘like us’ to enter a competition etc, it just results in thousands of likes and then before long, the audience starts to click ignore posts, it’s so obvious to many, just look at the number of people ‘talking about’ the page.

The key to building global brands is predicting what the audience wants and engaging them, using their feedback, this is where I feel that Google Plus is streets ahead of Facebook for businesses, it offers immediate direct feedback and statistics that are available for all to see, there is no hiding, there is no misdirection.

I keep shouting about the Luxurious Magazine Global reach via the internet, Google Plus, MSN etc. but it’s easier to show you some visual facts that should end all the arguments. These examples I will provide only increases my utter frustration as to why some of the luxury brands still have an attitude out of the dark ages and have misguided loyalty to platforms, publications, websites that generate relatively little publicity for a brand or product. (and you all know my thoughts on some of the luxury brands rudeness and highfalutin attitudes that can turn people like me off within a couple of minutes!)

Aside from a few of you, I bet you didn’t notice that on Google Plus you can see how popular your articles are not only by the people that click +1 (this is generally a small %), or those that comment but by the number of times your articles lead/main photo on Google Plus has been viewed (click on the lead image, and under the photo is a figure showing views). Regularly, Luxurious Magazine articles become globally ‘Hot’ and get placed within a special ‘What’s Hot’ section, or one of our #tags starts to trend around the world, this too creates enormous visibility to our brand and the subject matter.

We created an article about the US company, Tanom. Just the first image was viewed 117,907 times* in less than 12 hours – the full gallery had been viewed over 200,000 times.

Our Italian based photographer, Simone Zeffiro’s Harley Davidson gallery from his visit last week to EICMA in Milan was also hugely popular with a total in excess of 60,000 views

*In the time it took to compile this piece, the Tanom article lead image had been viewed a further 10,000+ times. This should help to provide a small insight into how big our audience is and why you should be using Social Media like Google Plus to get your message out.