It used to be Facebook and Twitter that were topping the charts when it came to sending traffic to beauty brands’ sites, but the influence of these two social media sites are slowly declining, with the focus shifting to video-sharing platform YouTube. According to CosmeticsDesign.com, 2012 saw YouTube emerging as the top source of upstream traffic for twice as many brands.
Facebook remains the largest source of referral traffic, but a year-over-year analysis suggests that its influence is waning as it declined to 71 per cent in 2012 from 89 per cent in 2011; whilst Twitter has essentially fallen off the map, registering no upstream or downstream traffic for beauty brands despite referring some – albeit minimal – traffic last year,” says New York market intelligence firm L2 ThinkTank.
One need only look at the dramatic increase in year-over-year video views to see the growing significance of YouTube for the beauty industry. The vlogger culture remains strong on YouTube and beauty brands are not only trying to get their products into vloggers’ hands, they are also peppering vlogger videos with InVideo ads,” says L2. L'Oréal Paris featured ads on eight of the top 15 YouTube beauty vlogger videos.”
It’s easy to understand the appeal of YouTube for both consumers and the beauty brands – with the video medium allowing vloggers to clearly explain to viewers how to apply the product and the results obtained. To help drive traffic back to the brand, products can be highlighted in a panel underneath the video and linked back to its regional e-commerce site.
While there is definitely still a place for Facebook and Twitter (and lets not forget Instagram and Pinterest) in the beauty arena, it will be interesting to see which beauty brands get aboard the YouTube hype set to soar in 2013.