During the middle of this evening’s CBS coverage of the NCAA Tournament, Vitamin Water launched a promotion referencing their Facebook public profile. This is one of the first television promotions I’ve seen of a company promoting their Facebook public profile instead of their own website. Yes, media companies have been quick to adopt in terms of promoting their Facebook and Twitter profiles but many consumer brands have hesitated to do any promotion of their Facebook pages outside of Facebook.

I remember only a couple of years ago when MySpace links were ubiquitous within television commercials. From bands to movies to consumer brands, there were plenty of large commercials referencing their MySpace pages which still remain much more customizable in terms of layout but no longer have the same distribution channels provided by Facebook.

With the redesign of Facebook’s public profiles, companies now have substantially more distribution and that means traffic to those public profiles have increased substantially. I would guess that this is only the beginning of an increase in consumer brands taking advantage of the reach that Facebook provides.

The VitaminWater page currently includes a number of videos about Steve Nash (who I’m guessing is the founder), and a few desktop wallpapers that users can download. Has the promotion been effective? So far it appears so. Thanks to the new feed distribution feature of public profiles, a recent video posted by VitaminWater received 365 “likes” and 46 comments.

The best part of promotions like this one is that they don’t go away. Previously when users became fans of brands, there was a much lower likelihood that a user would return to that fan page. It’s great to see more promotions taking place on Facebook. I would guess that we’ll see a substantial increase in brand activity over the coming weeks and months.