ideaLaunch Blog

Social media marketing experts agree that if you’re going to “win” in social media, you have to find a way to create Facebook content that is interesting to the average user.

The ad agency of Forsman & Bodenfors in Gothenburg, Sweden put together a genius Facebook campaign, although it may technically have been in violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use.

You can watch a video of how they went about creating Facebook content here.

Basically, the ad agency set up a profile for the store manager at one of IKEA’s new locations. They then uploaded photos into a Facebook photo album in the store manager’s profile. Next, they created a contest where you could win an item pictured by tagging an item in the picture with your name.

Why was this genius?

When someone tags themselves in a picture, the profile of the person whose photo album was tagged shows up in the tagger’s profile page. It also shows up in that person’s friends’ news feeds. Very quickly, thousands of Facebook users were promoting the profile page of the new IKEA’s store manager. Their friends weren’t looking at a banner for a furniture store, they were looking at individuals who were specifically talking about individual items that they were excited about. The campaign was interactive, viral and – most importantly – social.

As brilliant as this social media campaign was, you might not be able to run out and copy it today for your business.

Facebook’s Terms of Use forbid using any of their native applications in promotions. The tagging system is, in fact, a “native application.”

While you may not be able to copy this idea exactly, it no doubt calls attention to thinking simply when it comes to social media. The IKEA ad agency didn’t hire programmers to develop a new application. They didn’t buy ad space to target users with specific interests. Instead, they found a way to get their brand involved at a grassroots level with the social aspect of one of the most popular social media tools.

Britt Reints is a freelance writer living in Orlando, Florida.  She checks Facebook about five times a day but still has yet to win anything from it.

Tags: facebook, marketing campaign, social media

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 10th, 2009 at 2:12 pm and is filed under Social Media Marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.