Encash Your Popularity on Facebook Using Fanshala
For people like Mohit Madan, entrepreneurship is more than just a dream, it’s a passion. This entrepreneur who didn’t complete college has done something more unique than getting a college degree. He’s created a unique platform named as Fanshala, which helps advertisers use the fan pages of popular people on Facebook for advertising. So say you are someone popular, and have a FB page of your own with more than 1000 users, you are eligible to apply to Fanshala.
Fanshala’s platform can be used by advertisers to make their product/ideas reach to a larger audience on FB and in the process helps earn the owner of the page some revenue. So if you are musician with more than 1000 followers who also like music, then an advertiser that wants to connect with all this music-loving audience only has to advertise on you FB page to reach this niche target audience. Fanshala helps advertisers decide their audience and reach out either to the masses or to a niche. These ads are placed at the bottom of the Facebook page which belongs to the same niche.
Facebook gets close to 250 million unique visitors every month, making this social network giant the second most visited site after Google. This massive user base is important for advertisers to gain maximum eyeballs for their advertisements. At present there are close to 150 advertisers running their ads on Fanshala and Mohit believes this is just the beginning. “Advertisers running their ads on Fanshala are pretty glued as it gives them an easy platform to make their product go viral on Facebook. Moreover, it is the best way to reach a set of target customers,” he says. However Mohit is not too keen to share the names of advertisers that Fanshala is working with.
How to use Fanshala?
The first and mandatory criteria for someone to sign up for Fanshala platform is a Facebook page with 1000 likes. The advertisements are placed beneath the posts/ status updates of the person who has signed up. There is no registration fee is required for the initial signing process and users are paid on Cost per Click (CPC) model. The minimum redemption amount is set at $200.
There are no geographical boundaries for users to sign up and Fanshala has users from US, France, UK and Nigeria. The initial marketing campaign that Fanshala did was through word of mouth as the company wanted to avoid the tag of spammers. Mohit shares “Initially we started by word of mouth, virtually, by emailing our own friends who started mailing their friends and so on. The social construct and good networking led to this being spread like a wildfire. Today we have reach of more than 30 million (3 crore) individuals via different Facebook pages and have more than 3,000 registered users growing rapidly.”
Fanshala was formed in November 2011 by Mohit Madan and Tarusha Mittal. Mohit dropped out of University of Petroleum and Energy Studies (Dehradun) in the year 2010 and since then has turned serial entrepreneur. His first stint was with doonconnect.com, which delivered consumer goods and other stationeries to the students in the hostel. The portal was huge success and it also fanned his entrepreneurial career.
Mohit is the technical and business head of the team at Fanshala. While Tarusha heads the management and financial function of the company. Fanshala comprises of 10 employees who constitute risk management, sales personnel, support staff, designers and penetration testers. Being a bootstrapped company, Fanshala faces the crisis of quality employees who can share same vision and passion with the company. But the primary concern for Mohit is to attract more interests from the advertisers and also make sure the company is not misunderstood for MLM or a scam site. He also wants to generate some investments from the VCs to expand their services in the future. “In the next 5 years, Fanshala would expand to other platforms such as Twitter, YouTube and the big brother, Google+. We see Fanshala as a viral machine of the virtual world,” he concludes.
Website: Fanshala
