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Think outside the Box: Four Online Businesses that use Facebook Creatively

by John Larkin

John runs the blog here at eCommerceLift and is a verified Shopify Expert. Interested in an initial growth consultation? Click here

8 years ago

Think outside the Box: Four Online Businesses that use Facebook Creatively

As an online business, Facebook is the perfect platform to connect with customers and fans of your brand. However, with so much competition, it is easy to get lost in the crowd. Rather than just using a company Facebook page to display information about a brand, many businesses are encouraging their followers to get involved and have entertaining interactions with the company’s page. It is creating a unique, fun and enticing environment for customers to have an enjoyable experience and spread the word about your store. This really helps build a valuable community around the brand. Here are examples of companies thinking outside the box when it comes to using Facebook:

Threadless: Consumer Co-Creation

Threadless are an eCommerce store who have taken the online world by storm. They are an innovative company that encourages artists to submit designs digitally which have the opportunity to be printed on their merchandise.

Their customers then choose the designs that they like to be made into t-shirts, sweaters and a multitude of other apparel. As this customer interaction worked so well on their website they decided to incorporate the process into their Facebook account to generate co-creation and participation with their customers through social media generating very successful results.

Threadless have made it really accessible to do what they are famous for doing through Facebook: enabling customer co-creation. Facebook allows their customers to enter art work and to vote for what designs they want, developing an engaged, conversing community.

As they create posts that encourage artists to design and followers to vote, their customers continually revisit just to see winning designs and the hope to purchase the most popular. With posts describing themes such as “Frontier Pattern Challenge” or “The Lebowski Dude Challenge”, this is as much an innovative and creative way to engage with customers as it is playful and fun. Threadless have done an extraordinary job of building a community that follow the brand, keeping consumers informed and involved in what merchandise they are selling and making an individual, memorable Facebook page that makes customers want to continually visit their page.

Pop Chart Lab

Pop Chart Lab is an apparel and home-ware store offering unique designs for their customers. As it is a growing company, they are effectively using their Facebook page to generate traffic though to their website while offering a fun experience for customers.

Recognising the value of different holidays and the effect they will have on your sales is important and Pop Chart Lab have capitalised on this really well.

As Christmas for many eCommerce merchants is the busiest time of the year, adverts, promotions and deals are all over the internet and businesses need to give an extra push to get more customers to their websites and make the most of the holiday seasons. Capitalising on the Christmas season, the brand set up a “12 Days of Gifting” event. For the 12 days leading up to Christmas the eCommerce store placed a different product on offer with 15% off for just 24 hours. Offers such as 'Day 8: Gift for TV and Film Fans' and 'Day 5: Gifts for Book Worms' worked wonders for them. The events encouraged customers to revisit the website daily to see what was on offer and added to the excitement of the Christmas season making Pop Chart Lab stand out compared to its competition at a valuable time of year.
What more could you want from your Facebook page than have it encourage people to check it out every day!

Illamasqua

Illamasqua are a make-up company that was founded just over five years ago but are becoming extremely successful. They have a social media presence that is enviable to most eCommerce stores. Their Facebook page is one of their most successful social media platforms as they encourage a lot of customer interaction.

The company encourages their customers to send them images of the products they have purchased demonstrating how they are wearing them. They also emphasise and prioritise consumers to be creative with their products. These pictures are displayed on their Facebook and are the pages most liked posts with many posts getting upward of 175 likes. Customers feel valued by the business by doing this and enjoy the interaction with the brand.

Illamasqua offer rewards also for their loyal customers as when they reach landmarks on Facebook they offer their customers exclusive deals. Recently the company hit 150,000 Likes and gave their followers an exclusive code to get a discount. This is a very effective way to get traffic to the company’s website but also expands their presence on Facebook as fans of the brand will follow them avail of these platform-exclusive deals.

Official Irish Farmers Journal

Think it’s just edgy, trendy and urban ebusiness types utilizing Facebook? Think again. The Irish Farmers Journal proved that with a bit of dedication, any company can make a Facebook campaign successful. With their ingenious and playful “Selfies On The Farm” - the daily paper made their Facebook page a real talking point online.

Getting mass media coverage and large numbers of customers visiting and communicating is difficult but a dream for any business. Irish newspaper, the Irish Farmers Journal, achieved this with their tongue-in-cheek campaign called “Selfies On The Farm”. This was a competition held on Facebook where farmers were asked to send in pictures of themselves on a farm, allowing the Facebook fans of Irish Farmers Journal to vote for the winner.

Cheese!

Cream!

Butter!

The competition became an instant and massive success being widely reported in the media and on social networking sites globally. Each picture got upwards of 300 likes and international websites such as NBC News and Buzzfeed reported about the competition, with the Buzzfeed article being seen by over 80,000 people. It just shows that by thinking outside the box, any company can run a successful Facebook campaign.

Have any online businesses impressed you with their social media creativity? Have you used social media to engage with your customers or joined a Facebook community of a company that was doing something different? Please let our readers know in the comments below.