How Ikea uses Facebook

In response to Ashkan’s blog post How to Get Consumers to Promote Your Business?, here  I want to collaborate on the reasons why Ikea’s promotion through Facebook has created so much buzz and been so successful.

(A better look of how the promotion works can be found here IKEA Malmo’s Facebook Showroom: A Viral Social Media Success)

First of all, the promotion can reach a lot of people, especially their targeted cost-conscious but also chic-design-looking consumers. Traditional ways as TV commercials and magazine or newspaper ads are having decreasing number of viewers, and they are more costly compared to this Facebook promotion, which cost nothing except for the work to create a profile and upload a dozen photos.

Secondly, contrary to TV commercials and magazine or newspaper ads, this promotion is interactive. Customers are not only passively looking at a video or picture, they are actively being part of the promotion by tagging themselves and leaving comments. It becomes a fun thing for a lot of people to be engaged in and being able to participate in it creates a stronger memory for its potential customers.

Thirdly, as one of the main features of Facebook, subject to individual settings, what someone does can be broadcasted to his or her friends via News Feed. In this way, either consciously or unconsciously, the user who tagged him or herself or left comments on the Ikea Facebook page spreads the word of the promotion to all his or her friends on Facebook.

Besides being a great advertisement for the new Ikea Malmo store, this promotion also adds value to customers, not only to those first-tagged Facebook users who got free furnitures, but also their general customers by reducing the cost of promotion.