A few urban clothing brands do it better than others when it comes to Facebook. Here’s a look at the strategies that make the following four apparel pages pop.

Rocawear

Rocawear defines the lifestyle for today’s young hip consumer offering a variety of jewelry, fragrances, outerwear, dresses and more; so the company’s Facebook strategy reflects this with varied content and original promotions.

Quite often Rocawear’s page shares relevant photos, videos and polls about their own products, celebrity happenings, recent events and insights into the hip hop culture.

This varied content is super enticing for existing fans to interact with, simple because people are visual and enjoy looking at photos and videos.

As a result, Rocawear has more than one percent of its audience “talking about this” brand on Facebook; one percent may seem low, but for the mainly passive Facebook audience this is hard to achieve.

Why is the content they share more enticing than other pages? In the screenshot above, you can see how Rocawear shared a branded YouTube video that highlights the Dynamic Diplomats of Double Dutch. The post simply asks “Can you do this?”

It’s a straightforward call to action in 17 characters asking users if they can double dutch themselves, tempting fans to leave a comment to an easy question. The video is simple, clear and short, just like the attention span of a Facebook fan.

Rocawear not only included the YouTube video in the link function from the Facebook wall, but also added a custom shortened URL to the post giving users another way of reaching the video and watching it. Since the URL was shortened, it’s helpful that it was customized to say “thatsrwdynamic.”

This helps Facebook users have a better understanding of where this shortened link will take them if they click. Posts like this help increase clicks on their shared links, interactions with their posts, views on their videos and ultimately more visibility for Rocawear.

Baby Phat

As the premier metropolitan fashion brand, Baby Phat has consistently remained digital savvy with its outreach efforts throughout the years.

The company’s Facebook page features both engaging content and a one of a kind Facebook shopping experience. Facebook e-commerce is still in it’s early stages for a few reasons, but nevertheless Baby Phat is ahead of the curve with their custom shopping platform directly on its page.

The retailer believes that when Facebook users are browsing the network they prefer to stay within the site and not be sent off to an external website, especially when it’s unexpected.

This way fans can stay on Facebook and still have the opportunity to buy their favorite Baby Phat products. The shopping application isn’t merely an extension of the website but a fully functioning store suited to the Facebook platform.

Overall their page provides value to its fans, turning them into repeat visitors and occasional shoppers.

Ecko Unltd

Visually branding your Facebook page goes a long way towards gaining the trust of your existing and prospective fans, making your page an enticing destination with valuable content.

As a global fashion and urban life style brand Ecko Unltd offers a consistent branded experience on Facebook, similar to its other marketing channels.

They’ve utilized the photo banner at the top of their page to include custom images of their logo in a graffiti font, echoing their brands feel in another place for fans to see.

These five images consistently change position, so Ecko Unltd took this into account when utilizing their photo banner ensuring that no matter the order the same branded message appears.

Timberland

Having custom tabs throughout your Facebook page can help give your fans a variety of destinations and resources to peruse, so that people keep coming back.

Timberland’s variety of tabs on its Facebook page accurately reflects their drive to encourage conversations around their page and subsequently their brand.

The company uses a photo contest tab that aims to bring higher levels of interaction from new and old fans alike, tempting fans to upload photos of their mountain chic style.

This tab, known as The Girlfriend Getaway Sweepstakes, is targeting the female audience members of the Timberland empire offering select fans Timberland boots or a weekend giveaway.

Promotions have proven to increase engagement on Facebook time and time again, Timberland is no exception to the rule.

Some of the other tabs, focus on various product lines Timberland offers, like the Original Boot.

The tabs give fans another look at the products they’ve come to know and love, but with the ability to share their experiences and memories with this product.

The Earthkeepers, Plant Trees and Timberland Hortiscope tabs all feature a variety of nature related content, giving fans another perspective on the Timberland brand.

Each tab gives fans a unique way to connect with the page and share their experience either by watching videos, creating a virtual forest or by taking a quiz.

Brian Honigman is a social media account manager at LunaMetrics.

They say the only constant is change, and in the case of Facebook’s changes over the past month, local marketers might get the edge over their larger counterparts.

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Do you advertise on Facebook? What if you could maximize your results by quickly and easily testing multiple images, headlines, body copy and audience targets?

All of this is critically important to advertisers, if they want to:

• Know what results you’re getting
• Optimize to get even better results
• Get the lowest cost per click, cost per fan or even highest return on investment possible

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A security firm in the U.K. has come up with a new product to help homeowners feel safe when they go out of town: Updating Facebook statuses to make it look like they’re sitting in your living room.
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While most Facebook page adminstrators love it when people reply favorably to a wall post, this same exact activity can get a financial institution in trouble.
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[9:15 am PT] We’re live on a conference call with Zynga, which is apparently making a big announcement this morning. Read the rest of this entry »

Lately my friends in marketing and advertising have been asking me more and more about Facebook. Everybody knows they’re supposed to be using it, and a lot of people don’t know where to look to find consultants and developers. Their bosses ask them, and they ask me, and I recommend myself.. of course.

Facebook has solved this problem while sharing a piece of the pie with its devoted developers. They have set up a special marketplace for Facebook Platform developers to advertise their services, and they have pledged to send all potential development clients in that direction.

To be clear, this is no small opportunity for developers. It’s a massive market.

According to Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, “Everyday the team here at Facebook talks with thousands of people, businesses, and some of the biggest brands worldwide who are looking to find contract development services, or developers to join their team. We’re planning on sending every single one of them to the Facebook Platform Marketplace, so the opportunity is huge!”

Those who realize just how important it is for brands to have a presence on Facebook will understand just how incredible it is that Facebook has setup an area for anybody to post ads for free, and that it plans to send customers there.

It will be very exciting for developers and potential clients alike, as it was pretty difficult to find a reputable coder if you were new to the game before. I would really like to see some sort of rating system and some requirements of legitimacy. I would absolutely hate to see it turn into a free, unregulated, unorganized freelance site with no individual accountability.

The only problem so far is that people looking for work seem to be posting in both categories (“developers wanted”, and “developers available”). Come on people.. play fair.

Kudos to Morin and the Facebook team. I’m sure I speak for the whole development community when I say “thanks!”

- Jonathan Kleiman

Building a successful Facebook App is tough enough without having to worry about plagiarism and idea theft. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to consider why any sufficiently successful application would not simply be amalgamated by Facebook. A brief exploration of the business mechanics behind Facebook, however, put these fears largely to rest.

The Facebook business model is neither new nor particularly complicated: generate as many users as possible and keep them engaged. Revenue comes primarily from local and online advertising, which appears at the lower left and bottom sections of the pages. The bulk of Facebook’s expenses come from development and hosting costs.

This is why the opening up the Facebook Platform works so well for Facebook. On one hand, third-party applications make Facebook more useful, keeping users spending more time and becoming more dependent on Facebook for all sorts of needs. On the other hand, an additional third party application costs next to nothing to produce, considering that the bulk of the original investment, developing the platform, was largely a one-time expense. Furthermore, third-party apps have to be hosted externally, saving Facebook relatively considerable hosting costs, especially with rich-media applications.

For this reason Facebook is highly unlikely to copy a third party application. Why pay for internal development and hosting when the same advertising revenue can be generated for you by somebody else, gratis?

The one concern here lies with Applications which stand directly in the way of Facebook’s future expansion plans, such as its rumored email system or a Web OS. In this way Facebook is like a charging elephant – as long as you don’t get in its way, you’re more than welcome to come along for the ride.

Alexey Komissarouk is a Technology and Business Consultant who has literally months of experience with the Facebook F8 Platform. He is available at AlexeyMK[at]gmail.com

Attentionsoft Inc. has made a pretty slick application that gives statistics on the growth of Facebook applications. This application is a necessity for anyone monitoring the virality of Facebook apps. It displays some pretty cool graphs displaying the number of users per hour and the total number of users for any given application. One pretty cool statistic is that the Top Friends application is growing at anywhere from 1000 to 7000 users per hour. Pretty impressive! Soon enough they will cross the 8 million users level. It would be pretty cool to turn this into a virtual stock market that trades applications as virtual assets. Mashable has already covered a few things you can bet on legally on the net, but it would be cool to add Facebook applications to the portfolio. If you want to track the growth of Facebook applications, go grab the Appsaholic application.

As a prior Finance club member, I remember playing stock picking games as a useful tool for becoming accustomed to trading stocks. Thanks to Ryan Price, you can now play against your friends and other Facebook members. While there are a few quirks in the system, this seems to be a step in the right direction. If the profile view gets smoothed out, I am willing to bet that this becomes a pretty popular application, especially among finance enthusiasts. If you are into finance or just trading stocks in general, go check out the Stock Pick Competition application.

As a side note, I am noticing a common occurrence on Facebook recently. Not necessarily with the stock pick competition application but in general. Developers have begun adding non-functional applications. I can sympathize given that after launching my own social networking site, I was receiving non-stop complaints from users that were finding bugs. While it is difficult to catch all bugs while developing an applications, all developers should both externally and internally test and iron out as many bugs as possible prior to launching.