The volume of Beauty tweets is overwhelming these days. Many people ask me: "What beauty blogs should I read?". Facecaker has organized a vast amount of content generated by beauty bloggers, magazines, manufacturers, networks, news, product reviews, salon/spas, marketing/consultants/pr and stores. Once you click on their specific pages you will find a list of latest tweets, a brief description, links to their site and twitter page, plus numbers of friends and followers. You can either quickly navigate all tweets, links and pictures or follow the lists. Follow them on Twitter @facecaker.

Insight by Leah

Konectors, a London-based organization that finds "connectors and mavens" that have both an online presence and the social networking power to influence product purchases on behalf of advertisers, recently released a report on the Top 50 Beauty Blogs.   It should come as no surprise that topping this list is Temptalia – a blog that we have highlighted as both engaging and insightful for its audience.  Two other blogs of note include Naturallycurly.com and Basenotes.  As noted in the report, these top 50 blogs receive over 2.8 million visitors per month, and beauty companies should realize that these visitors are actively responding to content and engaging in conversations about products.  Among the other things that Konector factored into their analysis was how the blogs used various social media networks to engage consumers on their blog, on Facebook, on Twitter and in particular, YouTube.  As Konector director, Kingsley Mauder, correctly notes, YouTube and images are increasingly important in beauty purchases.

Top 50 List

Konector Report Overview

Shared by Andrea

Blogs are great resources for marketers. Temptalia, besides having a constant stream of comments on its posts, also asks direct questions to its reader base. There were 39 responses to the question “What role does packaging play in your purchases?” posted on June 26th. Many said that packaging is very important, but functionality and simplicity seemed to be a common theme. However, product quality is still more important.  The following brands were mentioned as great examples of packaging: MAC, YSL, Guerlain and Benefit. Product development, marketing and sales teams should be monitoring the most active blogs in their categories in order to take advantage of these free outputs that are direct results of mass collaboration. Visit Temptalia to review the 39 responses.

Shared by Andrea

In light of potential regulation by the FTC on bloggers, Total Beauty Media CEO Emrah Kovacoglu wrote an article that was distributed on their June newsletter called: “Beauty brands should not be working with bloggers…directly, anyway”.  The article created a massive reaction in the beauty blogging community as he made some strong statements about bloggers receiving incentives from companies, not following journalistic standards, and their fear of producing bad reviews. After carefully reading it twice my take was that he was mainly using the FTC news to make a case for the Total Beauty Sneak Peek program in which they act as a middle man playing a buffering role in the community. The beauty of the very dynamic blogging community is their freedom to pick and choose what they want to review and how they want to review it. Readers are savvy and the best blogs will be the most successful. It is not the role of Total Beauty Media to determine what standards they should follow and help enforce it. There is space for beauty blog directories and aggregation online, but not for creating a force that will help ‘control’ them…glossies operate in controlled environments, not blogs.

Reaction from Bloggers (First published on Bionic-Beauty.com):

• Bionic Beauty – Total Beauty’s Blog Blunder
• Robyn from Purely Cosmetics – Blogger Product Review Uproar
• Carleen from Beauty and Fashion Tech – Responding to Total Beauty’s Suggestion that PR Should Not Work Directly With Bloggers
• Beauty Junkie London – TB Gate: Beauty Blogging Uproar
• British Beauty Blogger – Say What, Mr. CEO?
• Gloss Menagerie – Total Beauty’s Drama Llama Extravaganza
• Casual Lavish – TotalBeauty.com CEO Knocks Down Bloggers
• The Nail Phile – Total Beauty Media’s CEO Turns On Us
• Beauty School – Brands Should Not Be Working with Bloggers
• Beauty in the Bag – Blogola Schmogola
• Advice Sisters – Bloggers Under Attack

Response from Total Beauty Media CEO: Emrah Kovacoglu – CEO Total Beauty Media posted a 8.27 minute video responding to what he called a: “dialog generated from the CEO’s Outlook in the June issue of Total Beauty Insider”. The video was seen 252 times and no comments were posted.

Insight by Andrea 

Temptalia, part of Glam.com features amazing sneak previews and cosmetics reviews with a strong focus on M.A.C. Interestingly, it divides the content between M.A.C and non-M.A.C products. Founded by a 22 year-old student from San Francisco, Temptalia has a strong following with posts receiving hundreds of comments.  It has over 4700 followers on Twitter, having more than quadrupled its number of followers since January 2009 according to Twitterholics.com.

Check out the latest review for MAC Love that Look Collection for Fall 2009. Posted on 5/31and already received 202 comments. The post is pretty much pictures of the line with a brief description of the shades. Great shades by the way!