Promote Facebook Pages with QR Codes

https://apps.facebook.com/qryptal

Last week we opened up one of our experiments.
Our optimistic expectation was that we would probably get 50 codes created using this service in a month but we reached that milestone in a couple of days!


Facebook is everywhere, and frequently we come across businesses who ask visitors to connect with them on Facebook. Organizations on Facebook have a Facebook Page, whereas people have a personal profile. In the online world, connecting to a Facebook Page just takes a click.  But in the physical world, if you come across a request to "Like us on Facebook" (in a retail shop, on a poster, in a magazine, etc.) - this just does not work. It is unlikely anyone will type a long Facebook URL on their phone to connect, and they will forget all about it by the time they get back to their main computer.

So we thought that QR codes could help customers connect with Facebook pages and wanted to test our hypothesis. We talked to a couple of small business owners in the community who already had Facebook pages. We gave them a couple of ready-to-print sheets (below), and they displayed them at their stores:

This was done a couple of months ago and the business owners found that people were scanning the code every week.

This got us thinking about how we could make it very easy for small business owners to quickly and easily get a QR Code for their Facebook page. We delved into the Facebook Platform and were pleasantly surprised at the tools and API's available. After that we hacked for a while to create the App. Once you install the App and give it permissions, we use the Facebook API's to get details about your Facebook Pages and automatically create your QR Code complete with the name of your business, photo etc. You get the QR Code in two formats:

- A ready to print & use pdf like the image above and
- A QR Code image graphic which you can insert in posters, advertisements, cards etc

Without much fanfare we opened this App to the public and were surprised to see hundreds of codes being created in a few days. Encouraged by the response, we are working towards adding more features so that these codes become even more useful. 

Though extremely simple to use, this App uses a few advanced features of the Qryptal QR Code platform. One of the features is adding a QR Code to pre-defined template PDFs. In a future blog post we will delve deeper into this feature.


The Qryptal Facebook App is available here:
https://apps.facebook.com/qryptal