Best Buy Charm Offensive on Facebook

Best Buy are continuing to trailblaze in the world of social commerce, establishing themselves in a big way in Facebook with a Best Buy store, gift ideas app and more.

The “Shop + Share” storefront is slick, and allows you to browse  all of Best Buy’s catalogue, and ask your network for buying advice. Then select the product, and you’re taken to the Best Buy site for payment.

Idea Giftr is more rudimentary, but more innovative – it gives you top rated gift ideas by sex or age – for you or your contacts, and then adds them to your news feed with an I-want-one-of-those or would-you-like-one-of-those comment.  By adding better profiling, and allowing people to rate products, Idea Giftr could become the shape of things to come in social recommender systems.

Only downside is the gauche marketing copy that gets posted to users’ newsfeeds when they use Idea Giftr “I found this gift using Idea Giftr and I thought you would like it. Let me know what you think and get inspired gift ideas powered by real people.”  Come on Best Buy, why let the marketing guys ruin a great idea?

There’s also a SecretSanta app and more to come for the holiday season.

Since launching the new Facebook apps six weeks ago, Best Buy on Facebook has jumped from 27,000 users to around 900,000.  Best Buy advertised their Facebook apps for just 24hours, which took them to 163,000 users – and then the referral effect took over…

With Facebook contributing to more than 3% of all traffic to the top retail sites online, and as many as 25% of social network users posting links to other companies, products or services, Best Buy’s foray into the walled gardens of Facebook makes sense.

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