JCPenney, Purina, and Red Bull See Facebook Page Growth
Facebook occasionally folds unofficial pages of brands into official ones. That is what seems to have given JCPenney, Petcentric by Purina, and Red Bull some significant fan boosts around a week ago, according to PageData. Each of these companies is actively updating their Pages however in order to engage their fans.
Retailer JCPenney has perhaps the most interesting Facebook implementation out of the three. It is running a contest on its page where it asks users to post photos of themselves in JCPenney clothing. Fashion designer Michele Bohbot will pick three finalists for everyone to vote on. The contest started on the 9th and will end on the 30th of this month.
So what have been the results?
The first week saw almost no growth, but then it rose from 493,000 on the 16th to 541,000 on the 17th — again, probably because Facebook folded in an unofficial JCPenney page. Since then, the page has been growing by around a couple thousand fans a day. It’s not clear if the contest or something else is causing the gradual but meaningful new daily increase. At the beginning of this month, the company told Bloomberg that it had bought Facebook ads in August that grew its fan base from 22,000 to where it was before the latest changes. “It’s a much more significant part of our marketing mix and it will continue to be a bigger part of our marketing mix,” said Nick Bomersbach, vice president of the company’s jcp.com web division.
Meanwhile, Purina’s Petcentric page went from a tiny 34,000 fans on September 16th to nearly 131,000 on the 17th. It has been inching up by a few hundred or thousand users since then to reach nearly 139,000 fans today. The company is using the page to promote various sweepstakes it is running on its home site, along with the occasional funny cat video or cute dog photo to keep people entertained.
Red Bull’s grew from 1.18 million fans of its energy drink on September 17th to 1.29 million the next day, and has since continued its normal growth rate of a few hundred to a few thousand people per day. The page has been regularly promoting the activities of various athletes, bands and other people associated with the company, posting photos, videos or comments up to a few times on a given week — something it started doing months ago.
