Inside Facebook

Texas Pete Hot Sauce recently handed out 10,000 free samples through Facebook home page engagement ads and its Facebook Page, and the company is hoping to build on that campaign’s success buy recruiting more Fans with the promise of free hot sauce.

To promote its variety of flavors, Texas Pete was offering a limited number of product samples and included discount coupons for Facebook Fans. The company hoped to pass out 10,000 samples over a four week period, but hit that number of requests in just 6 days. Each sample contains a 1.9 oz. bottle of the consumer’s flavor of choice, can koozie (a bottle cooling sleeve) and a coupon. The coupon holds a unique bar code which the company hopes to use to track the redemption rate.

We’ve seen companies have success using Facebook as a springboard for sampling, with Splenda using a dedicated Fan page a few months ago to gather insight into public reaction to one if its new products.

Now that Texas Pete has seen that its Fans are paying attention, it’s looking for more of a Facebook presence. The company is promising to add a coupon for a “Buy One Get One Free” Texas Pete product to its Fan page if it can reach 100,000 Fans by Nov. 15th, Ryan Helmstetler of The Sales Factory, who built the campaign for Texas Pete, tells us. The page is currently around the 35,000 mark, but shouldn’t have a problem reaching the 6-figure mark by the mid-November cut-off date given recent trends in the “Food-For-Fans” campaigns that are becoming popular.

This approach is very similar to the Fan Woody campaign which just netted TGI Fridays a half-million Fans and counting (currently close to 640K) after the promise of a free Jack Daniels burger. While TGI Fridays also promoted their offer through more traditional media outlets, like television, Texas Pete seems happy to let word spread virally from its Facebook page. Given the brand loyalty that the hot sauce enjoys, it should only be a matter of time before Facebook users are flocking to the page to offer themselves up as Fans and get their free goods.