From Lady Gaga to Oreo, brands have been using freebies to build a social media following for years. The details may change, but the approach is still the same—build a following by giving something away.

In this article, I’ll cover five methods to grow your following using freebies.

#1: Work with Popular Apps

Work with existing applications on social networks (like Farmville) to make your own unique mark with a freebie. You get access to their network of users and they market the offer with you.

Look for apps that compliment your product and partner with them. Offer a great prize or exclusive access and promise only users of the app will get it. This exclusivity makes more people curious about the freebie and drives a following for your brand within the app. For example:

Gagaville takes over Farmville

Although it operates inside Facebook, Farmville is actually a social network within a social network. People connect with friends and build bonds by working together. So when Lady Gaga announced she would launch her own farm, Gagaville, it was a chance for her to connect with this large user base and use it to promote the launch of her new album, Born this Way.

For two weeks Lady Gaga practically owned Farmville.

Aside from being able to feel part of Lady Gaga’s universe, the Gagaville farm gave fans the chance to listen to new Lady Gaga songs before the launch of the album. No other channels had these songs, so for diehard fans this was a fantastic free bonus to be unlocked.

The masterstroke was that songs were given out in the days before the album launch. This gave the Lady Gaga PR team another means of promoting the album and getting fans fired up for launch.

It was also another story for the media to run before the launch, and because it was using Farmville, the story was even more appealing for the press. The album sales speak for themselves.

Billboard.biz reports that this is just the beginning. In an interview with Raquel DiSabatino, Zynga’s director of entertainment and media, they were told “Zynga’s phones have been ‘ringing off the hook’ from various music industry execs looking for ways to work with the company and its games, including labels, managers, and others.” So watch this space for more.

#2: Use Your Facebook Page

If you don’t have a Facebook page already, then make one now. It takes minutes and is a key place to drive people to learn more about your brand.

TOMS Shoes saving the world

TOMS Shoes built a following by giving stuff away, but they don’t actually give it to their customers. Instead they give away one pair of shoes for every pair purchased by a customer. This free pair is sent to the developing world.

TOMS reports on their progress toward this goal via a Facebook fan page—a page with over 900,000 fans. Although the number of fans has no effect on the number of shoes they give away, they’ve still been able to get people interested in their brand by giving stuff away.

The TOMS Shoes' philosophy.

TOMS’ Facebook page is branded with their “One for One” campaign, and they have a PDF available that shows all the good work that they’ve done. Although they would have worked for a good cause without social networks, it has nevertheless proved a very effective way of building a brand following on the network.

TOMS advertises a new shoe via their Facebook page nearly every day, allowing them to capitalize on this audience of fans, even those who only joined to learn about the donations made by the company.

It goes deeper than just Facebook, with FastCompany.com finding that “a standing army of social media activists and over 1200 TOMS university clubs use their online and personal networks to broadcast their love of TOMS Shoes.”

#3: Encourage User Content on YouTube

Create a YouTube account and hold a competition where people need to film themselves to enter. You’ll get viral content from other people doing the hard work, and if you include example videos of yourself and your employees, it gives people something to aim for. For example:

Be the Beatles

To promote the launch of his remastered albums, Paul McCartney (known by many for his involvement in the Beatles band) asked fans to create videos of themselves singing his song “Maybe I’m Amazed.” MSN Music reports that fans could then win advance copies of the album, but only if they got the most views.

Just some of the 135 video entries received.

McCartney then added the best videos to his YouTube account, which builds his own YouTube following by giving fans a central place to observe the competition. The landing page of his profile is branded to promote the new albums. It has a call to action for anyone arriving via the competition. It’s an account with 8,977,352 views.

The competition itself has 135 videos, all recorded by fans who want to win, and fans who want to have the most popular video. As they promote their own video, they are in fact pushing the new albums as well by singing a McCartney song—a very clever strategy.

#4: Promote Via Twitter and Set Up an Alert Using TweetDeck

Don’t just consider your own Twitter account. Give people a reason to talk about your brand on their accounts. Set up an alert on TweetDeck to tell you when people mention your brand on Twitter. Then monitor conversations and reward those spreading positive messages. In time you can encourage more positive brand discussions by offering freebies and rewarding loyal tweeters. For example:

Toyota gives away $1 million

Rather than giving someone a product you can also give money back. Toyota employed this strategy in December 2010 by every day giving 250 people the chance to earn $500 for tweeting that they had bought a new Toyota. This flooded Twitter with brand mentions of Toyota from satisfied customers.

Toyota encouraged happy customers to spread the word for cash.

People tweeting that they had purchased a car was a very effective form of promotion. To see people you follow actively promoting a purchase is certain to increase the likelihood you would consider that brand in the future. With the $1 million offer, Toyota dominated Twitter for a solid month, and gave out a good brand message all round. This helped Toyota achieve an 8% rise in sales year over year (source: The Guardian).

#5: Build a Competition Within Your Own Website

Build a competition within your own website and then encourage people to enter through any social network they wish. Although you don’t need to create any social media profile for this to work, it helps if you register accounts with YouTube, Twitter and Facebook. For example:

“Compare the Market” Offers a Dream Job

In a recent Social Media Examiner post, Ben Pickering highlighted how running a sweepstakes is an easy way to increase the number of Likes on your page. For Compare the Market, this sweepstakes focused on a dream job. People were invited to apply for the job of brand ambassador, which would earn them £40,000 ($65,000) for six months’ work. Not a bad payday, and certainly a good freebie.

The winner was revealed from 1,000 applicants.

More than 1,000 entrants then had to promote themselves across social media in order to get the most votes to win. With all of these people trying to get heard, it helped drive traffic to the site in large numbers. Once there, people could Like a candidate, which then drove more awareness of the brand and competition.

The winning candidate made his way to victory thanks to a tweet from Davina McCall, one of the biggest celebrities in Britain, who has over 650,000 followers. It generated amazing exposure for the brand, and that’s just one of the tweets for one candidate. When you factor in all of the other candidates’ efforts, the viral impact of the campaign is impressive.

What are your thoughts on using free stuff to build brands? Have you seen it work anywhere else, or do you feel brands’ marketing efforts are better spent elsewhere? Please share your comments in the box below.

“OK, I’m impressed. Now what is social gaming exactly and where do I play?”

At first blush, social games aren’t too different from traditional online gaming. Both types focus on entertainment appealing to a wide audience, with simple mechanics and relatively short periods of play. Yet unlike traditional gaming, social games are distributed through social networks and existing relationships with other users through invite systems, news feed postings, user-to-user notifications or paid acquisition.

Social gaming allows games to create unique content and characters by tapping into a player’s existing social network. This social DNA has made games such as Crazy Planets, Mafia Wars, and Farmville incredibly successful.

Source: Info Solutions Group

According to the Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010 Report, there are three core elements a game or service should have to be considered social:

1. Social graph data is an aggregate profile of revealed preferences such as your friends, interests, demographics, and lifestyle information.
2. Game play should be casual and designed for short duration, leveraging-high frequency and brief visits.
3. Games are usually free to play with revenue generated through virtual goods.

Though there are numerous types of social games, the Inside Virtual Goods Report does a great job of chunking them into four basic buckets.

#1: Resource Management and Simulation

Players are responsible for managing resources to achieve a specific, somewhat predetermined goal. With finite resources, players are left to make key decisions.

An example is FarmVille where you grow delicious fruits and vegetables and raise adorable animals on your very own farm. Watblog reports that FarmVille has an astonishing 82.4 million active users and over 23.9 million Facebook application fans.

#2: Gambling

Social gambling mimics popular examples from real life, except games are played with digital dollars, rather than hard currency. Alternatively, you can accumulate points to win a prize. ESPN’s Streak For Cash boasts over 3 million players per day and is a seven-figure earner for the sports giant, according to John A. Walsh, executive vice president and executive editor of ESPN

Streak For Cash: A seven-figure earner for ESPN.

#3: Care-taking

These allow users to care for a pet or avatar, like in Nintendogs or Tamagotchi. This type of game serves a specific emotional need, and promotes healthy nurturing and social interaction.

#4: Casual or Arcade

Tetris, Scrabble, Super Stamp and Bejeweled Blitz are all excellent examples of popular arcade games now played on social networks.

Over 100 million users play Bejeweled Blitz daily.

Have fun collecting stamps by matching shapes in Super Stamp.

“Who Has Time for this Besides Kids?”

Social games are rapidly maturing and currently span numerous demographics. Teenagers to grandparents are enjoying games from Farmville to Mafia Wars, spending endless hours with fellow players and then posting their scores for the entire world to see.

According to the Social Game Summit in 2009, 50% of Facebook gamers are over 25 and women outnumber men, 56% to 44% respectively. At the time of the summit, there were 100 games with at least 100,000 players, 30 games with 1,000,000 and 3 games with 10,000,000+ users!

MSN Games reports 40% of their casual games customers are college graduates or higher, 25% are in a professional or managerial role at work and 55% have a household income of $50K or more.

Not just for kids anymore: the average U.S. gamer is 30 years old. Source: Industry Gamers

“How Do Social Media Games Get Monetized?”

Though some games still rely on traditional advertising models, an increasing number of game makers are trying new ways to monetize their efforts, and with success. It’s often a numbers game, with developers focusing on simple design supported with incentives through progress and rewards.

The end game, though, is always easy sharing.

To leverage word of mouth, developers must focus on creating dynamic game titles that incorporate the ability to build social capital for bragging rights; leader boards that aggregate statistics, achievements, user rankings; and access to tools that improve status. Facebook makes it easy to spread the word with features such as Facebook connect publish2stream, notifications and “liking” a page, as well as other sharing features.

However, popular doesn’t mean profits unless you have a longer-term monetization strategy in place.  CNET recently reported that gamers are actively making purchases to enhance their gaming experience, with free-to-play games paving the way for monetization.

According to Inside Virtual Goods, monetization strategies are usually one of the following:

Virtual Goods

A rising trend with promised growth. Virtual goods are the new Holy Grail for game designers, allowing developers to monetize products that don’t technically exist. Virtual goods include in-game items like power-ups, avatar accessories, or decorative items users purchase within the game itself.

Virtual goods account for over 90% of all revenue generated by the world’s top social game developers. Designers optimize user experience through additional gameplay, missions, and quests, without having to worry about overhead or unused stock. It’s no wonder they are so popular.

Video game market research from VGMarket sponsored by PlaySpan

Sponsorships

In-game advertising is gaining slow but steady traction in the world of virtual fun, with sponsorship from premium brands also growing at a modest but steady pace. So far, social game developers have been far more focused on building small, scalable virtual goods-based models than building games tailored to pitch to brands.

Source: Microsoft Advertising

White Label Games

White label games are built once, then individualized and licensed again and again. A developer can create a quality app focused on fun while leaving the edges of the game open for branding. This allows developers to market their game to companies that can find new and interesting ways to bond with, expand, or sell to their audience.

Why Should Brands Start Jumping Into the Social Gaming Space?

The name of the game is more eyeballs and longer brand engagement. And companies such as Arkadium are planting their flag in this trend. As stated on their site, “Arkadium creates innovative game solutions for consumer brands, ad agencies, online gamers, and any company looking to expand their presence. Our games reach millions of people across all demographics through the most popular online destinations.”

Their client roster is impressive, with some detailed testimonials from clients such as AARP that said, “After the launch, traffic shot up to an average of 4.5 million page views, an increase of 294 percent.”

AARP-branded games: Mah Jongg Dimensions (6).

What’s the Future of Social Gaming?

It’s clear—games are becoming the community and community becoming the game. Foursquare is a perfect example, with social capital badges given out or unlocked based on offline behaviors. Foursquare has exploded to 1.8 million users, and with a rumored cash infusion coming its way, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Gaming in China is bigger than ads or search, which might explain Google’s reported $100-$200 million investment in Zynga, a top social gaming company. Even a listing by appdata.com of the top five games paints an astonishing picture of growth in social gaming.

Just look at 2009 and the first half of this year and it’s easy to see where we’re headed.

Social media is a game-changer. It’s impacting who plays, along with when and where they do it. Because of the viral aspect, social media even affects how games are developed and their shelf life.

According to Zynga, a company’s success revolves around three factors:

1. Ability to drive new users
2. Ability to create an engagement loop
3. Access to an open communication channel

Gaming success is dependent on platforms such as Facebook for continued benevolence to their developers.

Are You a Social Gamer?

If you’ve ever counted followers, retweets, comments or even sent a good-karma chain letter, then you, my friend, are probably “guilty.”

If you Twitter, link, Stumble or Digg, share, measure, collect bookmarks… If you have created an avatar, asked for notification of messages, events, comments, etc… by definition, you’re a social gamer.

Do you play social games? Have you considered creating a game for your business? Please leave a comment in the box below.

What is Geotagging?

Simply put, geotagging is the process of attaching geographical data (longitude and latitude) to photographs, videos, websites, status updates and even emails.  This geotagged data shows where the photos, videos, etc., were created or modified.

Google Maps shows the details for a salad bar in Austin, Texas—aligned on a map using latitude and longitude values.

The technology originally started off as a feature, but entrepreneurs like Dennis Crawley and Naveen Selvadurai anticipated that geotagging would become a much bigger phenomenon. As a result, they created Foursquare with foundations based solely on geotagging.

What’s Foursquare?

Foursquare is a social network fused with a game that anyone can play, from anywhere in the world. It allows people to “check in” to any location they visit. To play, all a person needs is a cell phone that can browse the internet (and a decent signal!).

Foursquare lets users "check in" to locations as they travel, unlock items and complete "to do" lists, creating a game around the service itself.

Players are rewarded for their continued check-ins via a point scheme by acquiring badges and earning status ranks. For example, Foursquare will give the “local” badge to users who check into the same venue more than three times in one week. If that person checks into a location more than anyone else, they will become its Mayor.

Why People Love Using Foursquare.

Foursquare Mayors receive special attention for their loyalty. Wouldn't you reward your most loyal customers?

People love a great game, and surprisingly, Foursquare is exactly that.

When you become the Mayor of a venue, it feels like a real accomplishment. It opens you up to added perks that only you are entitled to. You want to brag about it to your friends and networks. It becomes viral.

A pretty accurate rule of thumb for any business is this: Whatever people find fun and engaging is where your business should be.

Andrew McCormick summed it up perfectly in his article in Marketing Magazine:

“Brands support the service by offering deals to participants based, for example, on the number of times someone ‘checks in’ to their local branch.

The benefits for companies include increased footfall and the recruitment of a network
of brand ambassadors who will pass on recommendations to their friends and Twitter followers. Brands can also gather insights into the behavior of customers and what incites consumers to visit their stores.”

Andrew didn’t mention that Foursquare actually integrates with Facebook as well, so there’s an even tastier proposition for pursuing a marketing strategy that incorporates social geotagging networks.

Why You Should Use Geotagging With Your Marketing Strategy

Foursquare is great for generating a buzz around your brand. You can showcase your offers to a wider audience through viral sharing. It also incentivizes people to visit your business, which leads to buying your products/services.

You should take Internet-based games like Foursquare seriously—they are big business.

For example, according to Technology Talks, in 2009, Zynga earned $145 million in less than 6 months as a result of their flagship Facebook game, Farmville.

Foursquare is growing at a steady rate with a user base of around 150,000 people and it’s definitely gaining momentum with new deals and partnerships…

Who’s Already Leveraging This Geotagging Service?

Recently, Foursquare teamed up with movie producers to promote movies like Valentine’s Day.  Also department stores like Debenhams and fast-food businesses like Domino’s Pizza are now partnering with Foursquare to offer added perks to regular customers.

This is why you need to be thinking of ways you can implement geotagging into your marketing strategy—you should be aiming to get a piece of the action while it’s still buzzworthy and free.

A 5-Step Action Plan for Implementing Foursquare

Registering your business with Foursquare is as easy as 1-2-3.

1. Find the button above on the Foursquare home page to register your business. Click it and follow the onscreen instructions. It’s a very simple, quick process (you don’t need to register to create incentives as you’ll see, but if you do your offers appear on the website and mobile apps).
2. Create materials that advertise your participation with Foursquare such as posters for your storefront and for the walls inside.
3. Advertise your participation on your website, blog, Facebook and Twitter profiles and other social networks.
4. Engage with Foursquare users who visit your business. Thank them for playing and let them feel noticed and appreciated.
5. If you’re serious about engaging your users, you could mention the Mayor each month on your website or blog and maybe even offer added perks.The key is in creating loyal, avid fans who will represent your brand when you’re asleep. If you do this successfully, the return on investment should far overshadow the prizes you offer as incentives.

What if I Don’t Sell Location-based Products or Services?

You could even take it a step further and create working relationships with businesses that complement your product or service. For example, if you have a continuity product or service like web hosting, why not approach a local computer store and organize an offer whereby the Mayor gets a 15% voucher off the monthly premium hosting package?

This way, even if the store wants to sweeten the deal and serve up its own perks as well, it could still leverage your service to make a recurring commission from any customer it refers for you.

It’s a Win-Win Situation.

Even if you don’t have a continuity product or service, or you feel that what you have wouldn’t sell on this platform, you can still learn from businesses like Foursquare.

Geotagging is just a vehicle that Foursquare taps to achieve success. Ingredients that matter are engagement, compulsion and loyalty, among others, which gently guide users into the sales funnel.

If you can replicate the same sentiment that Foursquare users feel when they interact with the service, there’s absolutely no reason why you can’t have the same success.

Do you think there’s potential for your business to offer perks to customers through Foursquare? What are your thoughts on this new marketing strategy? I’d love to hear your comments below!

ComScore reported that the popular networking site surpassed 100 million U.S. visitors in a single month, joining the elite list of sites (including Google and Yahoo!) that have also reached this milestone.

This major success led to another Facebook record as founder Mark Zuckerman reported they had reached 350 million users in total.

And the impressive stats don’t stop there.  ComScore also reported that Facebook took up 5.5% of all time spent online in the U.S. during the month of November.  Considering how big the “online world” actually is in terms of web pages, this was no small feat!  Check out this image:

Image taken from mashable.com

About the same time the Facebook stats surfaced, Morgan Stanley released The Mobile Internet Report. This report covers an array of trending themes, including an in-depth look at Facebook’s place as a social networking giant and soon to be “close partner” to the expansive world mobile.

Based on Morgan Stanley’s report, here’s a snapshot of Facebook’s reach, impact and marketing advantages:

Facebook Usage Stats

These stats may shock you:

• Shared content (web links, blog posts, notes): 3.5 billion/week
• Photos uploaded: 2.5 billion/month
• Videos uploaded: 14 million/month (more than 19,000 per hour!!)
• Events created: 3.5 million/month
• Users who have signed on with Facebook Connect: 80 million total across 80,000 websites since it launched in December 2008

The Power of Facebook Apps

According to Facebook, they currently house over 350,000 apps. Here are the top Facebook apps*:

1. Farmville (63 million) 
2. Causes (35 million)
3. Café World (28 million)
4. Mafia Wars (26 million)
5. Happy Aquarium (24 million)
6. Pet Society (21 million)
7. FamilyLink.com (21 million)
8. Yoville (20 million)
9. Texas HoldEm Poker (19 million)
10. Farm Town (18 million)

*These stats fluctuate slightly each week depending on usage. 

Here’s an interesting fact:  7 out of the 10 apps above are actually social games. Social games are those played on social networks where there is a level of interaction with others (taking turns) and you can see others’ actions as the game progresses.

Because social gaming is currently the leader in app development, marketers can take advantage of this as they look for ways to cross-promote and engage with their audiences via new platforms.  It comes down to meeting your audience where they are already spending a good portion of their time.

Wonder if Facebook app development is a lucrative opportunity?

Here are two examples of successful Facebook app developers.  Zynga, one of the largest developers of social games on the web, has developed 36 Facebook apps, reported $67 million in ’09 revenues and 183 million active users.

Playfish, also an online game developer, has created 10 Facebook apps, reported $30 million in ’09 revenues and 60 million active users.  Pretty impressive when you consider how the top apps on Facebook are used solely for enjoyment.

To put the success of Facebook applications into perspective, the Morgan Stanley report listed a few impressive real-life examples. Here are two of our favorites:

Facebook Rivals a Guinness World Record:  Currently 7 games on Facebook get more monthly active users than all players on World of Warcraft (an online game that holds a Guinness World Record for most popular multi-player online game of all time).

Facebook Rivals the Home of the Quarter Pounder: According to the report, “It took McDonald’s more than 55 years to open 32,000 restaurants worldwide, compared to only 4 weeks for Facebook users to open more than 1.5 million virtual restaurants on Playfish’s Restaurant City app, a game in which users start their own restaurants, employ friends as chefs and waiters and compete with other restaurants in their area.” Wow!

Facebook Takes on the Mobile World

Here are some more interesting stats:

• It is estimated that 17% of Facebook users currently access the site using a mobile device, and that number is estimated to skyrocket to 90% within 5 years.
• Mobile Facebook users are 50% more active than non-mobile Facebook users.
• 1 million users commented on their friends’ status changes on mobile devices within the first 24 hours of the mobile feature’s launch.
• There are currently 180+ carriers in 60 different countries promoting Facebook mobile products.
• Here’s a graph to show Facebook’s steady rise of mobile users:

Image taken from The Mobile Internet Report by Morgan Stanley Research

There is no doubt that Facebook is in a class of its own in the social networking arena.

Do you think Facebook can stay on top? Do you use Facebook more often than other social media tools?  Have you had any major successes with Facebook? Let us know about your own Facebook experiences!