Inside Facebook

Southwest Airlines is making a holiday travel-season push for Facebook fans with a giveaway called Fans Fly Free. It’s running from December 8 to 31, awarding 100 pairs of free roundtrip tickets to users who become fans.

The company has already been making use of its Facebook page for making announcements, such as which flights have wireless connectivity. It’s also been promoting special fare deals, directing traffic back to Southwest.com as well as other efforts intended to engage users.

But the giveaway is not the end-all, be-all of Southwest’s holiday marketing strategy, as actually entering the contest requires more than simply becoming a fan.

One must, first, allow Southwest access to your profile information, not only giving them what amounts to a free consumer data survey, but also creating the potential for the company to make more user-specific advertisements to fans on Facebook.

Contest entrants then enter personal information — phone, email, date of birth and state of residence. This again allows Southwest to hop from the realm of Facebook directly into the email inboxes and cell phones of their fans, so it can do things like provide state-specific specials and offers.

Southwest Airlines is among a group of large corporations trying to turn Facebook fandom into business via such giveaways. Similar tactics helped push Starbucks to be the biggest Facebook Page, back in July — it offered free ice cream and pastry promotions, and passed Coca-Cola as the most popular brand on the service.

Another interesting approach was T.G.I. Fridays’ September bid to pick up 500,000 fans for Woody, the campaign’s everyman face, by offering fans a free Jack Daniel’s burger.

Traffic on Southwest’s Facebook page, according to PageData, was up for the first part of November (pre-Thanksgiving) and tapered off towards the end of the month. It remains to be seen exactly what impact the giveaway may have, but if previous endeavors like Starbucks’ are any indication, it could be significant.