Bebo

How Bebo is the UK & Ireland’s most popular social network, it is no surprise that there are many different ways that businesses and organizations can tap into Bebo as a means to exercise fans, the proliferation of words and simply entertaining people. There are 40million user profiles on Bebo, and it was the soil for sowing some pioneering developments in online communication, perhaps best known for onlilne drama series such as Kate Modern and Sofia’s Diary. The fact that Kate Modern won a BAFTA and one of the most popular episodes of Kate Modern receive 1.5million views (when the Big Brother TV final episode in the same year received only 900,000 views) is a testament to the success of the platform.

The most common and easiest way to the market, Bebo is the creation of a profile page for your product or brand. Hundreds of these pages are there, but I wonder how many percent of them are always actively in use. One of the biggest mistakes companies make is to stick something hurry up and then realize that they do not have the resources to actually do something with the page, Bebo and explore possible “friends”, or worse of all - respond to inquiries. Creating a page on Bebo is the easy part, the administration of the responses, requests, questions - and let’s face it - spam, is quite another. But by far the most successful profile pages on Bebo actually putting something back into the community. Freebies, competitions, fun games and useful widgets are sure to gain more Brownie points than simply hitting a marketing message on a profile page and in the expectation Bebo-ERS, with her. Nobody wants to be associated with an ad.

The Bebo Guy * Speaking at ad: tech mentioned a good example of how to do it properly: Fantagraphics ran a competition on their profile page, where every Friday at 5pm, they would choose someone from their community of “friends” and their Profile pic on the main Bebo homepage for 15 minutes. Your profile pic would also appear on the big “neon” at Piccadilly Circus for 15 minutes at the same time. Of course, the winners were more than thrilled to tell their friends to check the Bebo homepage or the lights at Piccadilly Circus. The Bebo member gets to its 15 minutes of fame, Fanta gets some free viral advertising, Bebo gets more clicks on their homepage (and thus more ad views): It all win.

Another way to social networks, to the energy of your existing fanatical fans. There are hundreds of unofficial fan sites on Bebo and other social networks created by regular people, just like what it is. It all started when Bebo added a module that allows members to create fan pages for their favorite bands, but it soon evolved into fan pages for just about all goods, services or brands out there. Can you believe that Tesco unoffical fan club page on Bebo has more than 62,000 members and more than 10000 members subscribe to the blog updates? Believe it or not, it’s true. And this is just one of dozens of Tesco unofficial fan clubs - to just a social network. And it is not a conventionally exciting brand, either.

When Top Gear decided they wanted to Bebo, they found that they are already more than 90,000 fans on several Top Gear Fan Club pages. So rather than compete with them, they decided to order the 3 guys from Wales who set up the first and largest Top Gear Appreciation Society on Bebo. They decided that these guys all photos, videos, etc. and let them deal with him. For me, this is the best way of marketing at Bebo: to stay in the community, and are used by the community. These 3 guys would have kept doing what they do anyway, so why not let them feel closer to the mark in this way. Moreover, the people more than in Top Gear have only a very small scale involved, rather than running the whole thing and the moderate side, it is a non-beginner mode, really.

Marketing on Bebo or other social networking is not for every company and the success rates will vary wildly. But there are definitely opportunities, and I think it is a very intelligent move to existing social networks than to try to build your own. People are far more likely to deal with your company or organization from a familiar framework as to sign up for another username and password on a community Web site based on a brand. Would YOU read and post-toothpaste on a website forum? Do not expect your customers, either.