The Detroit Red Wings recently tried a promotion on Facebook that is this generation’s equivalent of a radio station promotion. After scoring the team’s 500,000th “Like” on Facebook last week, the Red Wings decided to give away tickets to its Stanley Cup second round playoff game via Facebook in a partnership with their communications sponsor AT&T.
According to a story in ClickZ, for last Wednesday and Saturday’s playoff games, a team rep appeared at an AT&T store in Detroit. While there, the Red Wings posted a Facebook message stating that the first five people to arrive at the store and mention the post will get a pair of tickets to the next playoff game. In both cases, the tickets were snapped up in less than 15 minutes.
The team likes the promotion because it believes that Facebook is helping to reach a new, younger demographic. And even for the older mother who won, it was because her daughter saw the promotion on Facebook and called her mother, asking her to go to the store and try to win a ticket.
The Red Wings haven’t spent any paid advertising to build the team’s Facebook base of fans. It’s built the base organically, doing things like having the public address announcer at its games mention the Facebook page during games. Or putting a link to its Facebook page on the team’s own home page.
Besides its huge Facebook following, the Red Wings have 53,600 followers on Twitter and regularly integrate Facebook efforts into the micro-blogging site.
