Social marketing without give aways

A lot of people feel that the best way to gain exposure on social media for a new product is to spend lots of money advertising it, either directly or through competitions or give-aways. Not so for Nars Cosmetics, they decided to utilise the power of social marketing in a different way - by creating an app.

Their Warhol App would would take a snapshot of you via a web cam, or you could upload a pic, and then add an Andy Warhol look to it. This would produce a new cover image and/or profile photo for you to use, although the image does have the Nars Warhol branding included (a very subtle but great way to raise awareness). 

The idea was to promote their new Warhol Collection, and it worked, as every time someone updates their cover photo a unique update goes out to their friends, unlike when a profile image is updated.

The app attracted a relatively small number of users on Facebook — 3,143 — but an impressive amount of engagement: Together, those users made more than 5,300 images and spent an average of seven minutes and nine seconds using the app, generating an estimated 823,000 impressions on Facebook.

The app is no longer on their Facebook page, although they were smart enough to provide the app off Facebook as well, which had an even higher number of users and traffic, thanks to tech and beauty blogs talking about it. However the app still requires you to login via Facebook to use it.

Take a look at the video of the app below, and try it out for yourself.