PBNJ Marketing Blog

What do you do when you can’t beat your competitor? You bring in the BIG guns. Microsoft recently added FarmVillle to its MSN family of games with the hopes of establishing a bigger presence on Facebook. The trick now was to let the 81 million monthly users of Farmville know that MSN has a home for FarmVille and that Bing is the search engine of choice.

As any mammoth company would do, they threw money at the problem, “farm cash” to be exact. Bing kicked off a Facebook “Fan” page and complimented it by running a sponsored ad on the bottom right of the FarmVille page. Their ad was simple, “become a fan of Bing on Facebook and receive three units of “farm cash””.

 Here are the stats from that campaign:

 12:40pm Tuesday – 8:11am Wednesday – Before the campaign started, Bing had 117,000 “fans”. By 8:11am on Wednesday that number rose to 539,000. As of recently, Bing’s “fan” page has 564,000 fans compared to 524,000 for Google’s fan page. According to AppData, 28.7 million people palyed FarmVille on Tuesday, giving this strategy a 1 to 2 percent click thru rate from players.

 Now that Bing has this fan base, the conversion strategy starts. Fan page postings include “find better tips for FarmVille on Bing” or their latest posting:

 Bing Any FarmVille fans out there? Try using Bing to get the most out of your crops and animals.

We’ve got great results to help you make better decisions in FarmVille.  binged.it

Microsoft’s Facebook strategy seems to be on the right track; getting fans involved through Facebook and getting them to try their decision making engine Bing.

As all of us tackle the social media maze, it’s refreshing to see huge players such as Microsoft tackle the social media market share dilemma one fan at a time, just like us little guys do.

If you had that kind of budget, would you have done anything different?

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