Ensuring a viral growth of the Facebook fan base for PillowU (PDF)

Research Paper (undergraduate) from the year 2012 in the subject Communications - Public Relations, Advertising, Marketing, Social Media, , language: English, abstract: Foranije SE is a start-up of ten student of Fontys International Business School Venlo. From December 2012 the company will produce and sell pillow cases divided in the three product lines "Morning After", "Spotlight", and "On My Mind" under the head of the brand PillowU. While the target group mainly contains young people in the age of 14 to 29 living in Germany, an online shop enables customers from other regions to also buy the products.

As the main aim of the company is to gain hold in the market within the limited time in business (until summer 2013), a rapidly growing consumer base is needed. Customers are believed to not buy several products, following that the off-line target group is too small to contain the necessary number of potential buyers. Therefore, the company concentrates on online customers. A viral effect is hoped to occur by the use of social media as suitable to the target group's preferences. Since the financial success of the entire enterprise relies strongly on this viral growth of fans, it is of utmost importance to find out how Foranije can ensure this viral effect to occur.

Facebook is the most important tool for the company. Not only is the experience of the relevant members of Foranije large enough, also it is the most appealing way of communication for the target group as it is free, easy to integrate in the user's everyday life, and offers a wide range of possible content. This content may be divided into two categories: written- and visual posts.

Having defined visual posts as the area of research, mainly because of the large amount of potential content, such as videos, images, photos, or polls, the detailed research question is concerned with the details of Foranije's visual content. The final outcome of this report gives the best way the online section of the marketing department can draw up their content strategy in terms of visual posts.

While the three main types of visual content on Facebook, photos and images, videos, and polls, all offer the chance of viral growth, only one type can be described in detail due to limitations of this report. Out of these three possible solutions, photos and images are chosen as the best solution. They not only offer the largest range of potential posts, they are also time- and money-effective and are believed to be meaningful to the members of the online target group.