Words Go Further

Eleven examples of Facebook fan pages for brands

As Facebook passes the 300 million user mark, it’s becoming an increasingly important channel for brands looking to communicate and connect with people.

Facebook Fan Pages are a great way for companies to manage this communications and the smart ones are doing really interesting experiments here. Below, I’ve looked at 11 brands which are playing around, with different levels of success.

Threadless.com

These guys are amazingly innovative with their online stuff and this Facebook presence is no different. Facebook users can comment on each T-Shirt and there’s an embedded shopping component. Seamless and fits just perfectly. Threadless rule.

Best Buy
Best Buy really get the network potential of Facebook. You can browse the catalogue within the site, but crucially, you can then ask your friend set whether you should purchase a particular item. Their Gift Idea app also integrates with the Facebook wall function to great effect.

Adidas
This isn’t much more than a campaign site really but what’s interesting is the way Adidas localise the content for different markets.

Gap
Gap’s Fan Page looks lovely and there is a LOT of content in there. But dig a bit deeper and it’s effectively a collection of campaigns with very little integration with Facebook. Looks nice though.

Red Bull
This is a really nice Twitter integration. Red Bull have athletes who tweet and this aggregates their tweets with a Facebook tab in a way which is usable and friendly. You can filter by sports type and be name.

Pizza Hut
Big, bold and brash. Pizza Hut are focused on making ordering easy and this is also the case on Facebook. The fan page is mainly used to promote this and other campaigns. Clear idea, well executed.

Victoria Secret Pink
This is interesting not for what they’re doing on Facebook but what they’re doing off it. Their Facebook presence is there purely to drive traffic to the VSPink.com site (which in turn, is used to support their offline campus promotions). This journey is made easy as fans can log in through Facebook Connect. Still feels like a missed opportunity to use Facebook more as a platform for growth.

Verizon
Mobile network Verizon have a fancy flash experience which pretty much hits you like a glossy advertisement. It feels totally surface level with no integration or involvement with the fan base.

Skittles
Skittles are brave in digital but this isn’t overly brave. Holla at the Rainbow is a campaign based around wacky answer phone messages. Although it’s well-integrated with status updates, the creative just isn’t very funny.

Puma
The problem with many of the Fan Pages above is they don’t nail either spreadable creativity or practical utility. Puma go some way on both but not enough to make it work. Puma employees share their picks on cool places in various US cities. It’s nicely delivered but fails to catch fire.

Asos.com
This is a brand which we’ve worked with at Syzygy. Asos.com already had a large social media presence and over 100,000 fans on Facebook. For this project, we supported an offline fashion competition with a Facebook campaign and poll. It tapped into the network potential of Facebook as fans encouraged their friends to vote and participate.