How Microsoft Bing 'Farmed' for new users

I had got this interesting article from WebProNews...

More people use Farmville than Twitter, according to Bing, and People are sharing all kinds of activities within Farmville itself. That's why the company saw a great opportunity to experiment. What they did was offer a special offer inside of Farmville, that would give users free "farm cash" if they became a fan of Bing on Facebook, which would encourage continued user interaction with Bing. As a result:

- Over 72% of users who clicked on the engagement became fans
- 59,000 people published the story to their news feed
- Over 70,000 clicks were received on secondary feeds
- In 24hours, Bing had over 400,000 new fans to keep

Microsoft said its goals for engagement and social media efforts have been to:

- Add or create relevant value (stuff that's not even necessarily a Microsoft property)
- Add depth to Bing's personality
- Lead someone to a relevant engagement with Bing or each other.
- Yield passionate or emotional response from people
- Be intimate and/or scalable (can we be both)?

Bing's Farmville experiment achieved all of these. However, the point of this is not that you should go out and immediately start a campaign through Farmville (although maybe it's worth looking into if you think it's a fit). The point is that there are more ways to harness a massive social network user-base (Facebook recently surpassed Google as the most-visited site in the U.S. for the week), according to Experian Hitwise). That's a pretty impressive feat. Also consider that consumers favor brands who are on Facebook and Twitter, according to a recent study.

Really, it's not even about Facebook or Twitter. It's about getting out there wherever people are, and this is where they happen to be at the moment. That may change by this time next year, or the year after, but the principle will not. We're at a point in history where it's never been so easy for consumers and brands to engage with one another. Perhaps even better for brands, is that it has never been easier to reach customers in places they choose to entertain themselves, and I don't mean just get in their faces, but actually reach them and get that engagement from them.

Cheers

Santosh

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