In December 2009, I gave a presentation about the 10 best examples of brands on social media in the Netherlands. According to the then recently published Social Media Monitor part 2, Bol.com headed this ranking. At that time, Bol.com had exactly 780 friends on its Facebook page. That may sound a bit low these days, but Bol.com was one of the few brands that was active on Facebook at that time. However, a lot has changed since then.Let's fast forward a bit. Six months later, in June 2010, I graduated from Erasmus University with a study on the power of brands on Facebook. Because Facebook was still in its infancy in the Netherlands, I used the top 100 most valuable brands that are compiled annually by Interbrand. Internationally, things were going great by then and the first Facebook pages with a few million fans were a fact. I saw the number of fans increase by thousands every day while I was doing my research. At the time, I actually tried to make an overview of Dutch Facebook fan pages of brands, but I already had trouble finding more than 15 pages! In addition to Bol.com , Citroen , Nike Running and Arke were frontrunners at the time. I already wrote an article about it at the time under the title: the Facebook era has latvia phone number list dawned . But perhaps I was just a little too early with that statement. Call it foresight. According to the third edition of the Social Media Monitor, the use of Facebook among Dutch brands was already moving in the right direction.
In that summer of 2010, something else struck me. In the run-up to the World Cup, football giants adidas and Nike were engaged in a fierce battle for the hearts of football fans. Where Nike featured the obligatory .com domain name as the closing shot at the end of the commercial, adidas featured the Facebook URL: www.facebook.com/adidasfootball .
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For a while, it seemed that the Facebook pages had become more important to these brands than their brand websites. This perception was confirmed shortly after by an article in Advertising Age , which nicely illustrated that the Facebook pages of brands such as Coca Cola, Starbucks and Oreo attracted many times as many visitors as their brand websites.