Using Facebook Open Graph to increase eCommerce sales

Our friends at  Agorapulse (a full tool to administrate your Facebook fanpage) told me about this success story in sales generation by using Facebook viralization strategies.  The results of the action are amazing, particularly if you bear in mind that the cost of the action was – wait for it – zilch.

But let’s take it one step at a time. The client is http://www.marmara.com/, a French travel booking central.

Brief and budget

Agorapulse’s brief was as follows:

• Marmara wanted to launch a competition to attract more Facebook fans
• They wanted to use the Agorapulse competition app to do so
• Their latest competition had had an acquisition cost of 2 euros/fan
• They wanted to decrease that acquisition cost

The budget for the action:

• €25,000 for advertising
• €10,000 for any other notion (creativity, design, development, etc.)

That is to say, the client’s original idea was to invest a lot of money in advertising to attract traffic to a Facebook competition, and so get more fans and increase its sales.

The counterproposal

The proposal made was that the client didn’t really need to decrease their CPF (Cost Per Fan) or invest in advertising. They needed their customers to act as their brand ambassadors, giving Marmara products more visibility and creating more brand awareness in Facebook.

Actions performed

• The Facebook Like Box was included in every product page.
• The Facebook Open Graph was used so that, when a tourism destination was shared, a video, not an image, was shared.

Results in just 2 weeks

• Marmara got 93.000 Facebook likes.
• 13.4 million prints of its videos were generated in Facebook.
• The videos were played 1,750,000 times.
• 16,000 clicks to the Marmara website were generated.

What was the cost of this action? None. Every time a destination in the Marmara website was shared or “I like this destination” was clicked, the link was shared together with a video on the user’s Facebook wall.

It was as simple as going from this:

to this:

And the results were these:

But what was the impact on sales?

Over the next 3 months, clicks on videos shared in Facebook were calculated to generate €45,000 in direct sales (probably quite more if indirect sales are included). €45,000 just by changing a few lines in the code.

Ain’t that something?