Can I join your FaceBook fan club?

After finishing up a frantic day of closing up business prior to the Thanksgiving holiday, I decided to sit down and catch up on the news of the day.

I don’t watch a great deal of television, but I have this habit of news channel scanning. I hop from CNN, to HLN to CNBC to Bloomberg. This habit sometimes raises eyebrows, but it has some great benefits. Aside from keeping me in touch with the world even though I work long hours, It usually provides me with concrete examples of successful and not so successful uses of internet marketing.

As I flip the channel to one of the generic news stations, I find myself in the middle of your typical Thanksgiving shopping feature. You know the one; a rosy cheeked reporter stands in front of a collage of cashiers and people in puffy winter jackets hoisting bags full of goods. I’m guessing at this point that it’s going to be about how the retailers are going to defy the recession and bring in the customers.

I was right. And to my delight it’s about how a particular retailer uses Facebook. Jackpot!

After I’ve gone over the typical details of an SEO engagement with a customer, and we’ve begun to digress into other internet marketing possibilities, I’m usually asked how Social Media could help them to achieve their goals.

They ask me what’s involved and I talk a lot about social bookmarks, YouTube.com, Twitter and definitely Facebook. I propose various scenarios and we ‘him and haw’ a bit and get back to the task at hand; getting their SEO initiative in order. Maybe I should tell them to watch more TV?

Well, I now have a great story to use that’s relevant to the holiday season and researchable to some extent.

Ok, let’s go back to the news story. The retailer being featured came up with an innovative and effective way to leverage Facebook to increase their Black Friday sales. They advertised incentives directly to Facebook.com users. So what, right? Well, there’s more. The campaign included incentives aviable only to the retailer’s Facebook fans.

So you had to join become a fan to get the benefits. Their fans were allowed to visit the store two hours earlier then non-fans on Black Friday and they also received an additional discount on all purchases.

This is a brilliant example of using social media to affect revenue in a timely fashion, grow their customer base and facilitate an ongoing inbound marketing campaign. Enjoy!

Online Retailers To Offer Deeper Discounts, More Sales, This Holiday Season