Bing Farms for Followers
Microsoft Bing, Monitoring, search engine optimization |
Seeing the immense popularity of the Facebook game Farmville, Bing has began an advertising pilot earlier this week with Zynga, the social gaming company behind the agriculture-inspired time-waster as well as many other social games. This follows another Microsoft-Zynga partnership announced last month where Famville extended pastures onto Microsoft’s MSN Games property.
According to the Bing blog, the search engine made a cameo via an ad on the lower right of Farmville’s main page which ran from Tuesday afternoon up until Wednesday morning. This graphic ad simply invited players to join the Bing Facebook community by becoming a fan of Bing in exchange for farm dollars, Farmville’s virtual currency used to buy farm elements like animals and structure and for upgrading their game level.
As expected, the graphic ad*, sponsored by SocialVibe’s brand engagement service, enticed the players further upon clicking on it to get fun facts about Farmville and to make better Farmville decisions by searching through Bing. Players were also encouraged to tell their friends about it. But really, with a promise of free Farmville dollars, if you’re addicted to this game you will definitely click on the ad and share your good fortune with your online friends. As a result, this model made Bing’s brand advertising campaign successful as evidenced by the 400,000 new Bing fans on Facebook; the Bing fan page now lists 582,377 fans, even outnumbering Google’s 526,319 fans.
We’ve seen many advertisements lining page after page of social networking sites, all promising new features and upgrades or other rewards upon signing up. This Bing-Zynga campaign is the latest brand advertisement being integrated into the social gaming platform and one of the shortest ones initiated and completed in 24 hours. This is a proof of what we’ve always believed— that the consumer appreciates advertising and will gladly participate given that the contents are compelling enough and the incentives are rewarding enough.
“We are excited to have the opportunity to work with Zynga on this advertising promotion, as an interesting way of getting more people to experience Bing’s unique ability to help make decisions, whether in Farmville or outside in the real world.” Bing’s Liz Tassey Gerber says on a post on the Bing blog, “We look forward to engaging more deeply with these users and helping them learn more about Bing.”
For Bing’s part, they’ve managed to one up the competition in terms of Facebook followers; 40,000 new followers in a span of 24 hours on Facebook is definitely a huge accomplishment. However, whether this will affect actual Bing.com traffic or not will remain to be seen. In any case, it signifies a renewed interest in ad-social gaming integration and we’ll definitely see more of them in the coming months.
Popularity: 17% [?]
RSpears @ March 8, 2010
