Marketing with Facebook

It’s not often that my flatmate inspires me with some online marketing ideas; after all he works in personal injury claims and keeps trying to tap people up in the pub whenever he spots someone sporting a cast. However the last few weeks he, like millions of others, has been whiling away his time on the latest Facebook App to deny employers worldwide of the man hours of their workforce: The Never Ending Movie Quiz from Flixster.com.

The concept is simple; the quiz has millions of user submitted film questions that appear to you randomly. You answer a question correctly and you get 10 points. That doesn’t sound too exciting so far. However, the clever folk at Flixster.com have created a Facebook App so you can install the movie quiz on your Facebook profile. Then it displays who out of your friends is also playing the quiz, and in a stroke of marketing genius it creates a nifty little league table that shows just who, out of you and your friends, knows the most about the movies… or more accurately, who has the least amount of meaning in their life and can waste countless hours playing this cursed game.

Well, Paul was delighted at having over 7,000 points and being top of his friends league, but when I mentioned another friend of mine (let’s call him Dave Evans, not for anonymity – because that’s his name) had over 70,000 points he realised that moving much further up the league was going to take some serious effort, and the kind of social life normally reserved for World of Warcraft players.

70,000 points? At 10 points per question that’s 7,000 correct answers. How many hours are these people spending on this game? Even if Dave had spent just 10 seconds on each correctly answered question, that’s still over 19 hours solid! Dave Evans; get a life mate.

Now, rather than wade into the game and blindly start answering badly written questions about Harry Potter and Star Wars I thought a little outside the box. There are millions of people, spending countless hours on this game, being bombarded with movie information, all spurned on by the desire to answer just one more question to pip their friends at the top of their respective leagues. Now that’s what I call a captive audience.

This has marketing potential! Add your own questions…

Say for example you have a film to promote. Simply spending a few hours adding dozens of questions about your film, complete with screenshots, posters and even video clips (yup, you can upload video clips to the quiz too) will enable you to get your film noticed by hundreds of thousands of film fans in the kind of marketing blitz that would normally cost a decent size marketing budget.

I did this myself and submitted several questions for one of my old films ‘Cop on the Edge IX: Prelude to Justice’. By uploading the trailer, or rather using the already submitted YouTube version, and posing a question based on the trailer, I managed to get thousands of views of the film’s trailer in just 24 hours. The questions can also be used to promote websites, feature release dates or even prices.

Also with every person that adds the game to their profile, all of their friends get notified – thrusting the game in front of a wider audience. Thus the reach of the game grows at a geometric rate; the essence of viral marketing.

If however you don’t have a low budget film to promote, as let’s face it not all of us have these skeletons knocking around in the back of our closets, the Facebook App can still be of use to you. The real potential is in creating your own to promote your site, which is a topic for another time…

Darren
SEO Programmer