Best Buy Talks Social Commerce on Facebook

We recently chatted with Tracy Benson, the Senior Director of Interactive Marketing & Emerging Media at Best Buy, about the company’s recent launch of social commerce campaigns on Facebook and Twitter. Here’s a snippet:

Ms. Benson: At Facebook.com/Best Buy, you’ll see two tabs. One is Shop + Share and the other is Gift Ideas. So Shop + Share is, “Hey, I’m looking for a camera, I’m looking for Nikon D60.” Great. You can put in, “I want a Nikon D60.” Look that up. You’ll get from the whole BestBuy.com catalog, you’ll get the Nikon D60 and you’ll get the same experience in Facebook.

Then you can start wondering, “What do I need to know about this?” So basically anything I post on there then goes out to my wall. I can hear from my entire network and from people who aren’t in my network. What we’re finding is just astounding.

eMarketer: And how successful has this been?

Ms. Benson: Through these tools, our fan base is just growing exponentially. We only put it in about five or six weeks ago, so people are just getting exposed to it. Now all of a sudden we’re offering it and people are trying it and testing it. They are sharing it and then their friends are getting involved. Our viral influence has been astounding in the past two weeks. We’ve essentially grown from 27,000 users to probably close to 900,000.

The reason we’re growing is because people are figuring out the new things they can do with our brand and the new answers and solutions they can get in their environments, which includes this social shopping application.

We’ve made a real concerted effort in the past three months to leverage some of these assets we have and say, “Wow, we get over a billion visits at BestBuy.com and we know our core consumer is one of the heaviest Facebook users. Why don’t we put our BestBuy.com in our Facebook and see what the heck happens?”

So we ran one ad for just 24 hours. No discount. No offer. Basically said, “Hey, get connected with the Best Buy brand. The latest and greatest technologies. Come check it out.” We went from 27,000 fans to 163,000. Then that ad ended.

And talk about the social networks being sticky, these things are sticky like glue. And the viral influence from the 163,000 to the 900,000 in the last 9 days is just amazing.

eMarketer: What are the key things you are trying to accomplish with your fan page?

Ms. Benson: For us it really comes down to generating that brand awareness online in a social space, driving a strong and solid reputation and generating fans and leads that help us enable other people to interact and engage with our brand. At the end of the day we’ll have to get more ROI on a sales perspective, but our intent today is to learn. To learn what’s effective, what doesn’t work, what we need to do more of and what we can scale and do it in different ways.

The full version of this interview is available here, to eMarketer Total Access subscribers only. Every day they have access to new interviews with digital marketing leaders and trendsetting entrepreneurs.