Marketing for Free

Mark Zuckerberg has probably made it to the top of every traditional Head of Marketing’s black books. Even as these venerable gentlemen were coming to grips with the power and reach of the online medium, Mr Zuckerberg hits them with Facebook. This online phenomenon, along the more cryptic twitter and smaller cousins like linked.in and orkut are rapidly rewriting the rules of marketing. 

I could throw a bunch of numbers at you to show how fast Facebook and twitter are growing, but you already know that. What I want to do instead is to focus on how these two have emerged as amazing powerful marketing tools…especially for companies where having a marketing budget itself is a bit of a stretch. 

Social media works on the principle of six degrees of separation. So in theory, if you know the right six people on say Facebook, you will be able to connect to everyone on the site, and you can do this at virtually no cost. 

In preparation for this series, I actually ran an experiment to see if it was possible to do this for free. We set up a Facebook page for compareindia.com about two months ago. The idea was to try and grow pageviews for the site through the FB page. Initially Sharon Khare, the editor of the site and I, sent out requests to our friends to “Like” our FB page. That got us to about 60 followers in the first week. We also put up a Facebook widget on the compareindia to drive our regular users to “Like” our FB page. Sharon would regularly update the page with the best prices on a variety of products and I would respond to any queries from users.

Initially we had about four to six users “Like”ing our page everyday. While it was difficult to trace where these users came from, it was most likely from the compareindia website itself. The first set of users would generally not comment too much and all you would find on page would be updates from Sharon. However, over a period of time the number of “Likes” started going up every day. We currently average around 25 likes a day. We also noticed a growing willingness on the part of our users to engage in relevant dialouge.

We are also well on our way to achieving our initial objective of driving traffic from FB to compareindia. Month-on-month traffic has increased over 60%. While this has been over a low base, the continued growth of fans on FB gives me the confidence that this will become a major source of traffic for compareindia.com

 The key early take-aways from this experiment have been:

 Social media marketing is real and it works

• Like in traditional marketing, having a single uncomplicated message works best: Our message has been: “find the best prices on compareindia”. We could have chosen to go with a lot of others including our standard “compare products to figure out which is best for you.” But we choose the price angle and it is working for us.
• Keep your page open: A lot of pages on FB only have posts from the page owner. Users can only post comments. We have chosen to go the other way. Anyone can post on our page. This has encouraged users to ask us questions and interact with us and other users. On the flip side we do get some unwanted spam as other marketers try to take advantage of our user base. So far the number has been manageable and we simply delete their messages.
• Social media and viral are twins: FB and twitter are the fastest way to spread an interesting viral.

 This article is my first column on the topic. It appeared in the October 2010 issue Entrepreneur India. You can find it here: http://entrepreneurindia.in/facebook-for-marketers/5840. It was also reproduced by biztech2. The link is here: http://biztech2.in.com/blogs/editorial-blogs/facebook-for-marketers/94522/0