The Whopper Sacrifice on Facebook is Finally Sacrificed

August 25th, 2010 by Search Influence Alumni

Whopper Sacrifice Picture

The Whopper Sacrifice Comes to an End

Not enough people know about sweet little pieces of code that run on your web pages that show you how many people came to visit your site, where they came from, how long they stayed, and how many of those visits converted into actual dollars. Sure, Google Analytics might not be on the tips of the tongues of, oh, say 500 million people. But Facebook is.

Everyone who looks at this little gem below knows how well this viral internet marketing campaign worked, and how effective Facebook is when you want to reach the masses.

A few months ago, Burger King decided to offer a free Whopper to anyone who would sacrifice 10 of their friends on Facebook. I mean, the average user has 130 friends. Who wouldn’t go down to 120 just to have a free tasty treat? Who wouldn’t wallow in self-pity for joy knowing their cyber friendship was given up for a free piece of meat?

Apparently this viral marketing campaign worked well– maybe too well. The fine print says, “Facebook® has disabled WHOPPER® Sacrifice after your love for the WHOPPER® Sandwich proved to be stronger than 233,906 friendships.”

Two hundred and thirty three thousand, nine hundred and six.

Whopper Sacrifice Ends on Facebook

Whopper Sacrifice Ends on Facebook

These stats from viral marketing goldmine Facebook give so much more power to the phrase, “It’s all about who you know.”

Facebook has more than 500 million active users. People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. There are over 900 million objects that people interact with (pages, groups, events and community pages). The average user creates 90 pieces of content each month. More than 30 billion pieces of content (web links, news stories, blog posts, notes, photo albums, etc.) shared each month.

So what did Burger King find out from Facebook? That it works. And that makes me hungry.