500,000 Facebook fans in less than a week.
What does it take to attract a half million fans to a Facebook page in the span of seven days? A celebrity? An event? A monstrous give-a-way? A cause, like donate to Haiti or breast cancer awareness? A Super Brand?
Not necessarily. What has attracted over 500,000 fans (and growing) is…a pickle.
That’s right, a pickle. On a Facebook page titled “Can This Pickle Get More Fans Than Nickleback?” fans are signing up at the rate of about 3,000 per hour.
Pickle Facebook page
Silly? Definitely. But it speaks to the power of Social Media, and how a simple premise with a unifying hook can spread like a virus through social communities in a blink of an eye.
What brought people to the page? Was it a deep-seated hatred of Nickleback? A curiosity? A desire to belong to a group of like-minded people? A hunger for controversy? A chance to be silly? Or did they come just because their friends did?
The great thing about a page like this one is that you can come and join for whatever reason. You don’t have to say. You don’t even really need to be aware of the reason why. Just know that it’s possible. Something catches the fancy of America, and boom! The amplifier of Social Media gives you the tools to spread it instantaneously. Past phenomena were inhibited by the lack of “social viscosity” of the time. Think back to the seventies. How long did it take to sell 500,000 pet rocks?
Because Social Media works quickly, it helps to be prepared to work quickly as well. Opportunities appear then disappear with the frequency of the critters in a game of whack-a-mole. Deep reflection is not something that is rewarded when it comes to Social Media.
That doesn’t mean you have to fall back to a ready-shoot-aim model of dealing with Social Media. It primarily means once you understand your purpose, what your value is to your followers, and discover your voice, the reactions should come naturally. You won’t have to make an executive decision every time you see an opportunity come out of the woodwork, whether in the form of a user comment, a shout-out from a blogger or a quirky social phenomena.
After all, if a pickle can do it, so can you.
Posted by Mickey
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