Facebook is one of the fastest growing Social Networking sites on the net, even John Chow is on it. If you do not have a facebook account yet I do suggest you go and sign-up. Using social networking sites to launch new products, sites or services is becoming a new trend.
Recently we launched our XmasRadio site and Facebook Application to drive traffic to our Christmas Music radio station. Using our network of friends we drummed up some good traffic to the site and application. We pushed our launch out to 300+ users and now we have 300+ unique visitors a day coming from Facebook to our site. We also have 20-30 people adding the application a day to their profile. Using the viral nature of Facebook our numbers will increase from 300+ visitors a day to 1000+ day before Christmas.
So How Is This Evil?
To this point there is nothing evil about using facebook for viral marketing.
John would say “if you want more traffic then simply get a bigger network of friends.” To do that you could spend all day doing it yourself adding people randomly and possibly getting banned. Instead you can find someone else to do it for you and only pay them when they provide you the service in full.
I noticed at ScriptLance that they have projects to get large networks of friends on facebook with people bidding from $5 to $35 for 250 people in your network. For a network of 5,000 people would cost in the $100+ range depending on which programmer you picked. You could then leverage that large network to push traffic to where you would want it.
Do you use Facebook to do your launches?
This post was guest blogged by Gary Jones from BlueFur.com. BlueFur provides Dedicated Servers in Canada like the one that runs John Chow’s sites.