Fashion Industry Network on Facebook

This page records the Fashion Industry Network's presence on Facebook. The network - the Apparel Search Company's fashion industry community, launched in July 2007 - kept a Facebook page for people who used Facebook to meet others in the fashion industry, extending the community onto the social platform where many of its members already spent their time.

The page itself is the subject here: where it lived, the sections it offered, and how its address changed. Its first address was the long form of a Facebook page URL; it later gained the shorter address facebook.com/fashionIndustryNetwork. Both addresses are recorded in the References section of this page.

The Page and Its Sections

The network's Facebook page carried the community's outward face: links, discussions, photos and videos sections, mirroring the kinds of material members shared on the network itself. For a visitor deciding where to follow along, the Facebook page was the light-weight route - no network membership required - while the network proper carried the profiles, groups and forums.

The page sat alongside Apparel Search's own social pages rather than replacing them: Apparel Search on Facebook and Apparel Search on Twitter each have their own pages in this section, linked above, and the viral marketing glossary page explains the strategy that made a fashion community maintain pages on platforms it did not control.

Two Addresses, One Page

Early links point to the page's original long address, which carried the page's numeric identifier - the same identifier recorded in the company's own page records for the network. The page later gained the shorter, memorable address facebook.com/fashionIndustryNetwork, and both were in circulation at once; the shorter one is the address worth typing.

The network's community on Facebook also included a members' group presence distinct from the page. This record page keeps the page addresses because they are the ones a reader following the network's history will meet in older links - and because they document how social addresses for industry communities evolved from numeric URLs to named ones.

The sections the page carried map neatly onto the network's own content types: discussions for conversation, photos and videos for the visual record of the industry, and links for routing readers onward. A fashion community's Facebook page in that era was less a publication than a signpost - it told people who found the industry on Facebook that a dedicated network existed, and pointed them toward it.