The practice of giving away swag to promote a brand is old hat, but more and more brands are now using Facebook to find success with virtual swag, offering up free virtual "gifts" on the social network to create more brand awareness.

According to BrandWeek, brands like Sunkist orange soda and Ben & Jerry's have found larger audiences than those offered by big-budget Super Bowl commercials, all thanks to virtual soda cans and ice cream cones at a fraction of the cost.

Facebook began letting users send gifts to their friends in February 2007. Regular gifts offered by the social network -- birthday presents, hearts and hugging penguins -- cost $1 and show up in a user's profile after being sent by a friend.

Sunkist recently offered 250,000 free cans of soda for users to send to their chums, and the virtual sodas were snatched up in less than a day. "We got 130 million brand impressions through that 22-hour time frame," said Derek Dabrowski, Sunkist brand manager. "A Super Bowl ad, if you compare it, would have generated somewhere between 6-to-7 million."

Even a surefire summer movie success like "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" offered 250,000 virtual fedoras on Facebook. The practice of gift-giving allows brands to have the fans come to them and spread the product cheaply through old-fashioned word of mouth.

"Can you think of how much harder it would have been for Facebook to find 250,000 loyal fans that actually care about Indiana Jones? Now that's a costly venture," said Blake Cahill of Visible Technologies, a social media tracking company.

Brands did not reveal the costs for the gift campaigns, but they are part of larger media buys, according to Facebook.