Facebook Advertising | Social Media Marketing

Earlier this month, Starbucks surpassed Coca Cola becoming the most popular brand on Facebook, with close to 3.8 million fans. Coca Cola has a tad over 3.6 million fans at the moment. (Hilary Duff here isn’t doing bad either with over 570.000 fans on her official Facebook page.)

This is a direct result of Starbucks’ aggressive internet and social media strategy according to Starbucks digital strategy director, Alexandra Wheeler. Starbucks is now actively incorporating and utilising the most popular social media channels, such as Twitter and Facebook in its online marketing.

Starbuck’s Free Pastry campaign, where you received a free pastry with a beverage purchase was a huge success. Nearly 600,000 people reacted to that campaign on Facebook. Another hugely successful campaign was their Product (Red) campaign with almost a million people responding “yes” or “maybe” to the promotion last holiday season. Product (Red) contributed 5 cents for every Starbucks beverage purchased to the AIDS-fighting project. These results show the power of the Starbucks as a brand and how well it has been able to connect with their clients through these social media networks.

According to Wheeler one of the key priorities we have to think about when it comes to social media marketing is that we have to connect in ways that are relevant to those environments as well as to our consumers. One of the most powerful ways is by sharing content and participating in discussion.

Starbucks has also a big fan base on Twitter. They have over 270.000 followers and are following 85.000 of them back. Almost all of Starbucks’ posts are @ replies which means that they actually are communicating with their fans. Most of the communication on their Facebook page, however is done by the fans on the wall posts. If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed or ReTweet.

Businesses are gradually realising the commercial potential of 250 million Facebook users and opening shops inside Facebook. The latest shop to open doors is 1-800-flowers.com founded by Jim McCann who started his first retail store in 1976 in New York. Now the online flower retailer has launched an e-commerce store which they claim to be the first fully functional commercial store front inside Facebook.

Registered Facebook users can now order all kinds of flower products from the online florist and gift shop without ever leaving the social network environment. The shopping itself is quite easy and straight forward. First you choose a nice bunch of flowers from their catalogue; the prices vary from $29.99 to over $100. Then you enter your US based zip code and delivery date; next your contact details and the recipient’s details and finally your credit card numbers and you’re done. So, for instance as the lovely Sandra Bullock here had her birthday 4 days ago you could have sent her some red roses straight through your Facebook account. Very handy indeed! Sandra has about 30.000 fans on Facebook by the way!

The 1-800-flowers.com Facebook Shop has been built by a relatively new network developer, Alvenda who are based in Minneapolis. Alvenda was founded just last year by Wade Gerten, Brian Howe and Lou Abramowski. So far the Facebook Flower Shop has attracted 1,905 fans, me included, but I’m sure it will gain lots more as the news start spreading. Currently 1-800-flowers accepts payment with all major credit cards, but as (if) Facebook introduces its own internal currency (see Facebook Money Is Coming) you would be able to make purchases using that as well. If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed or ReTweet.

250 million people seem to love Facebook. Here’s a different, humorous view by Julian Smith and his friends…

If you enjoyed this post, then make sure you subscribe to my RSS Feed or ReTweet.

Michael Jackson died last Thursday in his home in Los Angeles 25th June 2009. The 50-year-old musical genius was preparing for what would have been a series of 50 mega concerts starting July 13 in London. He was the most talented and the most kind musician that ever lived. We will miss him dearly. Michael Jackson will live forever in his music.
…and apparently on Facebook as well. There are 495 personal Michael Jackson accounts on Facebook. Most of them are named Michael Jackson or Mike Jackson. None of these are the most famous Michael Jackson though. The King of Pop is represented by over 540 Fan Pages and 548 Groups containing millions of people. There are also 323 Michael Jackson applications and over 500 Michael Jackson-events. The five biggest Michael Jackson Fan Pages have over 7.5 million fans and the six biggest Michael Jackson Groups have about 400,000 members. Judging by these figures there is no doubt that Michael Jackson will become immortal and take his place alongside Elvis and Marilyn Monroe who have over 600 Fan Pages and over 1000 Groups (combined) on Facebook. Long live the King and the King of Pop!

Last Saturday at 1 minute past midnight Facebook launched the long awaited Facebook usernames to the general public. So far only famous people and celebrities, like good old  Britney Spears here have been able to enjoy their personalised Facebook names. The public interest was huge, so there were worries how the Facebook servers could cope with the high demand. Everything went smoothly though, which is a huge bonus to the Facebook back end guys.

Here are some signicant figures from the launch day. In the first three minutes over 200,000 usernames were registered. That is an amazing 1000+ per second during the first minutes of the release. After fifteen minutes, users had secured about half a million vanity URL’s. Within one hour, over 1 million Facebook usernames had been claimed. That’s an average of 279 usernames per minute. So far over 4 million usernames have been taken.

Did I get mine? Well, of course I did and I hope you secured your’s as well. I think www.facebook.com/krisolin is far better than the old and  cumbersome www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697888240. Please leave us a comment and let us know what name you got registered.

Facebook personal (or vanity) URL’s are coming soon! Facebook vanity URL is a more personal Facebook web address than the current one they offer. At the moment some priviledged (read=famous) Facebook users are already enjoying their own vanity url’s. Some good examples are the president of the United States, Microsoft, the musician Sting and the most famous TV-cartoon Simpsons.

Here is a top 10 list of famous Facebook users with their own names (not in any particular ranking order):

1. http://www.facebook.com/u2
2. http://www.facebook.com/barackobama
3. http://www.facebook.com/oprahwinfreyshow
4. http://www.facebook.com/Microsoft
5. http://www.facebook.com/sting
6. http://www.facebook.com/markzuckerberg (duh…)
7. http://www.facebook.com/coldplay
8. http://www.facebook.com/eBay
9. http://www.facebook.com/redcross
10. http://www.facebook.com/TheSimpsons

Luckily for the rest of us Facebook will soon be allowing all users to claim their personal, or vanity URL pointing to their profile page. For instance at the moment www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=697888240 is me, but next week it could be something like www.facebook.com/KrisOlin, which would be much easier to remember and use. No to mention the advantages for SEO purposes for famous people and companies. Google, buy the way, does not have their own Facebook URL. Hmmm? Facebook has recently asked their users if they would pay for a vanity URL. The results are not yet published, so at the moment we don’t know if  they plan on charging for them or not. In all likelihood personal names will be free, but busines names might incur a cost; possibly much the same way as paying for your domain name, for which you pay a yearly fee to the registry. This is the official, most recent comment from Facebook about the matter:

“Unfortunately we are not currently able to approve requests for vanity URLs. The only Pages that presently have vanity URLs are bands and businesses that partnered with us for the initial launch of this new product. We hope to make these URLs available for everyone to have on their individual Page(s) in the future.”

Well, the future seems to be now, since they have plans to make an official announcement no later than next week. The rules will prohibit trademark infringement and a lots of words will be blacklisted, such as generic terms and phrases. But for the most part, users should be able to grab a name that they want.

Vanity URL’s have proven to be a very powerful tool on other social networking sites such as MySpace and Twitter. It’s not just that users like them but it makes telling people your online profile name easier as well. People have also long used MySpace URL’s as their main online identity, even instead of a website. Twitter, more recently, has started to become the online identity provider of choice. It’s no wonder Facebook wants to enter this game now.

When the personal  URL’s  are available, you can with get more instructions from the horse’s mouth: http://www.facebook.com/help.php

Kris Olin
Web Designer | Internet Promotion Strategist
Msc (marketing)
http://twitter.com/KrisOlin (in the meantime)

The most popular people on Facebook are Barack Obama, Homer Simpson and Mr. Bean. There are  over 600,000 fan pages currently on Facebook. Over 57,000 of those pages have more than 1,000 fans each.

The top 30 fan pages are:

1.     Barack Obama     4544050 Fans
2.     Coca-Cola     2286085
3.     Homer J Simpson 2230644
4.     Nutella     2109429
5.     Pizza             2050050
6.     Mr.Bean     1974882
7.     Michael Phelps     1909378
8.     Facebook     1835553
9.     Windows Live Messenger     1826767
10.     Kinder surprise     1802602
11.     Chocolaaaaaaaaaaaaate     1800924
12.     Cristiano Ronaldo     1787865
13.     Sid             1679985
14.     YouTube     1664281
15.     Edward Cullen     1612729
16.     DR. HOUSE     1578536
17.     Boo             1542923
18.     Rihanna     1505949
19.     Adam Sandler     1486388
20.     Coldplay     1477028
21.     Twilight     1445260
22.     Donkey       1436120
23.     Batman: The Dark Knight     1349610
24.     Stewart Griffin     1339765
25.     Los simpson     1326733
26.     Lil Wayne     1325780
27.     Linkin Park     1319831
28.     South Park     1295837
29.     Chris Brown     1293294
30.     Converse ALL STAR     1289037