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What Your Business Can Learn from Facebook Scams

August 31, 2010 By 22 Comments

Scams on Facebook, where marketers offer fake gift cards for a famous company in order to drum up web traffic, provide a great idea for promoting your small business. You can offer legitimate gift cards to your fans and prospective fans, to generate a buzz about a sale or discount in services. Here is how the scams on Facebook work according to a PC World article, Ikea Gift Card Scam Takes in Nearly 40,000 Facebook Users:

“[The Ikea] scam page had taken in more than 37,000 users by 11:30 a.m. Pacific Time, offering [fans] a $1,000 gift certificate in exchange for promoting Ikea to their friends. At that time, the page was gaining new fans at the rate of about 5,000 per hour. The promotion, the page said, was only available for one day.”

To participate, users must become a fan of the fake Ikea page, hosted on Facebook, and then invite all their friends to become fans. They are then directed to an affiliate marketing page hosted by …, where they are asked personal information such as name, address, date of birth and home telephone number.”

You should mimic this Facebook scam, but there is a major marketing lesson to learn and use. Facebook fans are willing to spread the word about an exciting offer exclusive to Facebook fans, if you make a sweet deal. A $1,000 gift card offer to IKEA was “sweet” enough for more than 40,000 users to fall for it. What offer can you make to Facebook fans to encourage them to tell others about it? Some examples to consider:

• One time 50% discount
• Gift cards of smaller amounts
• Free products and services
• Offer gifts from larger companies that offer related products or services.

Give it a try, and measure the results in terms of web traffic to your Facebook page and website.

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  • http://www.networkintellect.com/services/data-feeds Feed Management

    The viral spread that can be achieved from a platform such as Facebook can prove to be of immense value to a business either small or large. Keeping your word on the offer is the most important part though, and businesses must not forget this.

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  • http://www.facebook.com/Network.Traverse.City.MI?ref=ts Michelle H

    Don’t forget that those 40,000 duped users are now a whole lot more leery about giving out their information or for even liking a page. You cannot build a satisfied customer base in a day so I would suggest giving the fans/likes the little sweet special deals and entice them to advertise for you. You can take your time and have a better clientele. One of my networked businesses has name the location contests daily for her fans it works at a speed she can run her business and still have time to interact. scamming your customer is never the right way to do it.

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    This is such a great post and a lot to learn from. One of those posts i love to print and keep for further revisions.

    I hope to see a follow up on this articles. Great Work!

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