Social media is here to stay and Web 2.0 is the future of the internet experts say.  That being said, we as marketers are still struggling to grasp the best strategy to expose our client’s brands and engage their customers through this young and developing communication median.

Facebook in particular has drawn a lot of attention recently from the marketing community with the burning question of how to market your business/product/cause to the Facebook community.  While there is no perfect strategy yet, some people have created “Fan Pages” for their particular business/product/cause that have been much more successful than others.

One good example is the Facebook fan page titled “No Microsoft Word, I didn’t spell my last name wrong”, which at the time of this writing has more than 1.5 million fans.  This is compared to the official “Microsoft Student” fan page which has only garnered a mere 100,000 fans.  But, my favorite example has to be a fan page titled “Can this pickle get more fans than Nickleback?” (note that the creator intentionally spelled Nickelback incorrectly to avoid copyright violations).  Admittedly, this is one of the more humorous/ridiculous Facebook fan pages out there.  But, this goofy idea that pokes fun at a popular rock band achieved its goal and gained more fans than Nickelback (1.5+ million!!) in just over two weeks time.

The moderator of the pickle fan page now has the eyes of over 1.5 million people to which she can advertise to, and she achieved this in just a little over two weeks.  Just think of the advertising reach your business could potentially have if your business’s fan page was even remotely as successful as the stupid pickle page.  The moderator of the pickle fan page now has transformed this goofy idea into a revenue stream by selling T-shirts with the infamous pickle on them.

So, it doesn’t necessarily hold true that if you produce good content on your social media pages (even if it’s original) that you will automatically gain more fans.  Successful social media pages do have one thing in common that should be observed by all web marketers.  The common theme among successful (in terms of number of fans) Facebook fan pages is that they have content that is provocative and that people can get passionate about.  Although bigger corporations need to be careful not to take a particular stance on such things as political issues, provocative content is still what gets people (Facebook fans) actively engaged with your fan page which translates directly into more brand exposure for your business.

Although you may think it impossible to create provocative content for your business; just remember, if a pickle can do it, you can too!