How KRDS Generates 250,000 Likes on Facebook

Through a Skype call, I got the chance to learn from Preetham Venkky, Business Head at KRDS India, about an interesting Facebook campaign his team has done for Air France.

The result of the campaign managed to attract 250,000 likes on Facebook in ten days. While 250,000 likes shouldn’t be the only factor to judge a campaign, it is certainly a strong evidence that the campaign has worked well. The budget allocated (confidential) isn’t very high but KRDS managed to help Air France to success. Venkky also took time to share with me some of the campaign success factors, listed below:

• Strength of the brand: Air France is well known
• Traditional media advertising: An integration strategy
• Some online advertising: Not necessarily just Facebook advertising
• Virality element of the application: Build to spread but not intrusively
• Real incentive: Round trip tickets to be won everday

More about the campaign:

With more than 150 brands managed, Venkky also shared with me that KRDS is one of the two Facebook Preferred Developer Consultants (PDC) in Asia, working closely with the Facebook team in Dublin and India. KRDS also uses Facebook virality elements in every app it develops and at the same time ensures great user experience.

Well, the case study and impressive background got me curious about the founders and their start-up story. Turned out, KRDS started out as a social network…

KRDS’s co-founders got inspired by Facebook at the time it was only available in the US and originally intended to launch a similar social network for French students.

Unfortunately, the site was released too late and couldn’t compete with Facebook which by the time had opened to the world. The team had in mind a killer feature as a means of last resort. But instead of implementing it on the doomed site, they wisely decided to make a Facebook application out of it. It was an instant success, it got more than 100,000 users in just 2 months.

The French social network was dead, but KRDS was born as the founders quickly thought of helping brands get in touch with users through Facebook apps. The first client was Eurosport, the number one European TV channel. Thanks to a prediction game dedicated to the 2008 soccer European Nations Championship, the campaign went extremely well. Since then, KRDS kept growing, getting to work with one famous brand after another.