03 Oct Is Ello For Luxury Brands?

…the short answer? No.

Thanks to a huge amount of paid PR and bored hipster journalists, the tech world has been talking quite a bit about Ello. I know what you’re thinking: “Oh great, another social network my brand will have to dedicate more hours to during the work week”. If you’re still dreading even opening a post about it to see what all the fuss is about, I thought I could spare you 10 minutes and explain why I think it will be a complete waste of time for luxury brands.

Ello is basically a very ugly version of Tumblr combined with Twitter, and its main goal is to stay ad-free. While this is all good and dandy, this is obviously a business model that is destined to fail, so I imagine it’s a promise that won’t be kept for long. I see it as more of a marketing ploy and one that has been working quite well when combined with the huge amount of paid ads their company has gotten over the past two weeks.

That and the invitation-only aspect of joining has definitely created a buzz, although they’re certainly not the first company to utilize this strategy.

The reason it isn’t worth it for luxury brands is not because of its odious interface, but rather because its focus is on user-to-user interaction and not brand-to-consumer interaction. Facebook has actually been on my shit list recently due to its reduced newsfeed interaction and ad costs that can get out of control fast. However, I’m still seeing large marketing budgets allocated to growing brand pages and we’ll see how that changes after the November 5th Facebook policy changes.

Ok Smarty Pants, Where Should We Spend Our Time?

From our experience and data over the past year or so, Facebook still plays a big role, but we’ve been way more heavily focused on Instagram for influencer marketing. Not only them, but the luxury-focused sites like JustLuxe, Luxury Society and ASmallWorld have all been a strong driving force.

I’ll be doing a series of posts dedicated to the rapidly-changing face of social marketing in the luxuryscape up until the new year, so subscribe to our newsletter at the bottom of the page to stay up-to-date. Think I’m wrong about Ello? Let me know in the comments below!