You don’t have to look far online to find praise for Facebook. The UK’s most popular social network has been heralded as an indispensible tool for online advertising and social engagement for some time now. But which brands are making the most of Facebook’s enormous marketing potential?

Using Hitwise data we have a number of different ways of answering this question. A first port of call is usually to look at the downstream traffic from a particular website (in this case Facebook), to see who is benefiting from that traffic.

I’ve filtered the results above to return just websites within our Shopping and Classifieds category to show the top 10 online retailers receiving traffic from Facebook. There is an interesting mix in this list between big online “one-stop-shops” which sell thousands of different products (eBay, Amazon, Argos and Play.com all fall into this category) and fashion brands including ASOS, Topshop, Next and New Look.
However, the downstream traffic alone is not enough to see who is making the most of Facebook’s marketing power. The reason being that 12% of all visits immediately after visiting Facebook go straight to Google, which would indicate that people have seen something on Facebook which they like, and they want to research that product or brand further through search. Using Search Sequence we can see what people were searching for online immediately after they visited Facebook to capture the data not just from Google, but from Bing and Yahoo! Search as well.

In total there were over 2.5 million search terms searched for immediately after Facebook in the last four weeks. The top 10 reveal searches for YouTube, Twitter and email providers, but digging a little deeper into the data we can see the top brands that were searched for immediately after Facebook. In the table below I have created an Index score which measures searches for a brand after Facebook compared to searches for a brand in All Categories. An Index score of 100 would be an average, but any score over 100 indicates that a brand is getting a much higher proportion of its searches after a visit to Facebook than it does in normal search.

The overwhelming trend here is that fashion brands are dominating searches after Facebook. Niche fashion brands in particular like Jack Wills and Republic have the highest Index score, followed by multi-channel retailers like Topman, River Island, Miss Selfridge and New Look. Interestingly, there were only 12 major retail brands that had an Index score of 100 or more, which shows there is still a huge opportunity for retailers to make an impact on Facebook. The 10 listed above however are the companies which are currently making the most out of promoting their brands on Facebook.
Follow Hitwise on Twitter.