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IKEA Facebook Viral Marketing a Big Hit

IKEA has benefited from a hugely successful viral marketing campaign using social media to promote its new store opening in Malmö.

Advertising outfit Forsman and Bodenfors were engaged to create a buzz about the new IKEA store without breaking the bank on exorbitant budgets. The agency decided to use Facebook to promote the IKEA store to create a ripple effect that would spread not just throughout Sweden, but throughout Europe.

The team “kidnapped the most popular function” of Facebook, tagging pictures, and used it to IKEA’s advantage to promote showroom products. After creating a Facebook profile for store manager Gordon Gustavsson, the advertising team uploaded 12 pictures of IKEA showrooms to Mr Gustavsson’s Facebook photo album.

Members of the community were then encouraged to tag the products they saw in the photos. Whoever was first to tag a product, be it a bed, vase or shelving unit, won it. Facebook did not disappoint, and suddenly the internet was scrabbling with users visiting the profile to tag pictures and begging for more pictures to be uploaded to win more products.

As the phenomenon grew, people were adding pictures of IKEA products to their Facebook pages and spreading them among friends all over the place; the online advertising campaign had evolved beyond its initial intention and gone truly viral.

“Instead of people just looking at a banner with furniture we got people them to personally promote IKEA,” said Forsman and Bodenfors on their YouTube video. The IKEA ad is a perfect demonstration of how fostering a community, and getting that community to advertise for you, rather than advertising at them, can lead to excellent results.

Viral Marketing news posted by Scott Tickner on 27 November 2009