Yesterday I saw an update on Facebook from Bing asking if any of its followers were Farmville fans and if they were they should look at one of Bing’s searches providing links to hint ands tips about which are the best animals to own in the game.
For my sins I use Farmville (pretty well actually at level 40 and way ahead of all my friends) but wasn’t that interested in the link and thought nothing more about it. However I see now, via Liveside, that there was more to this marketing stunt.
Bing we also offering people free Farmville cash (allows users to buy extra things in the game) if they became fans of Bing and this appears to have had a great effect on increasing Bing’s fans. On Monday Bing’s page had around 100000 fans and now after the ad it is at around 555000. That is quite an impressive increase but only accounts for about 0.5% of all the 83 million Farmville players; I wonder how many fans Microsoft is aiming for its Bing page.
It makes sense for Bing to be using social (and viral) media to raise its profile, considering its a fairly innovative online service, rather than some of the more tradition means of advertising. I makes me wonder how much money Microsoft have left for Bing’s advertising and if we can expect to see some more of these types of ads, although I am not sure if there’s a single bigger market than the “Farmvillians”.
Become a fan of Bing, if you aren’t already.
