Now when your fans increase from 1 to 5 it isn’t worth talking about anything but if a single step of yours pushes you from 100,000 to 500,000, it’s worth every word I write. Microsoft has surged overnight from having 100,000 followers to 500,000. What was their magic spell? Give those Farmville addicts currency in exchange of becoming a fan of Bing on its Facebook fan page.
The killer idea was that they enticed users to join in without actually having to leave their game and become fans of Bing. The trouble is who exactly is becoming a fan there? I mean you can have all sorts of people joining in for a bribe of the ever important Facebook Credits or some worthless virtual currency. The purpose here was primarily to make Bing the default search engine choice when it comes to finding tips for the game. How stupid. I mean wouldn’t it be easier for users to figure those out on blogs or with the friends who are busy engaged in the game as well?
What makes this strategy viral is that when you become a fan of any page, that is brought to limelight in the activity stream on the Facebook News Feed. With this method, the only thing that restricts your reach is the number of friends/connections that the individual has. And if I am not mistaken that on an average each user has a around 100 friends on the social network. This alone makes the entire promotion bit easy and more importantly viral. Other than that, we all know how rapidly the concept of anything virtual has evolved with Facebook so throwing away a credit or two to buy one fan isn’t really much loss given that this would eventually add up to a more fruitful fan force that would somehow associate itself to using Bing and giving it a significant presence on the social network.
To me, this is still in the early stage. Companies would try and leverage the power of these existing engagement pages and apps on Facebook to boost their following in the long run. Just think of it, big business have no issues with spending some cash and it is always essential for them to have a quick result spending money rather get someone try and do it form scratch. But then again, it really harms the brands in my opinion, just think of it if I were to say that Startup Meme would give away $1 dollar worth of virtual gifts to every one who joins our fan page, I bet everyone would irrespective if they love reading about Facebook or not. In my humble opinion, what you will actually have is a massive community that is kept alive by a very handful of fans.
