If you’ve ever tried reaching out to your fan base or users on the web through any social media channel, you know how hard it can be to get their attention. It’s even harder holding on to that attention once you’ve gotten it. One strategy that has proven itself to be highly effective within the social web is developing a routine. A routine is anything that can be established according to a schedule, and just like we all have our individual (and sometimes completely wacky) morning routines that we feel lost without, establishing some scheduled marketing elements can not only help to ensure that you keep on top of your social marketing activities but it can also help to increase your audience’s trust and engagement because they become used to the routine and expect that on certain days, they will be interacting with your brand, like on “Fashion Fridays” or Monday giveaways.
A great example of this type of routine promotional effort can be found on the Facebook Fan page of Swell.com. Swell is an online-only retailer of clothing, gear, and other products for the surf industry. Every Wednesday, they use Wildfire’s Social Media Marketing Platform to put out a sweepstakes called “Win it Wednesday!” where they give away cool but relatively inexpensive prizes such as a cute dress by Billabong or a trendy pair of board shorts. Swell’s Facebook fan base, which is at over 4,500 people as of this blog post, has become used to this weekly routine, which Swell has been running for several months. Based on the steady fan growth that Swell has experienced as well as the comments that fans are posting on Swell’s wall, “Win it Wednesdays” is proving to be a hit with fans and a highly effective strategy for Swell.
Your creativity is the limit on the type of outreach you could consider to run on a scheduled basis. It could be that the first of every month you giveaway a gift card, or every Friday you put up a new coupon to your store. You could be like Swell and set up your own Wednesday win-it, based on the product or service you are marketing.
Social media marketing outreach done around a routine doesn’t need to be a big, complicated affair. We can see from the successful example at Swell, if you can promise your users that once a week, if they come back to your page and check in, there might be something awesome waiting for them (like those really cute sunglasses) you might be surprised with just how many of your fans begin to make their own routines of visiting and interacting with your Fan Page around the promotions you’ve created for them.
Thank you for this post. I have been trying my hardest to get my blog followers and customer base to interact with me.
I look forward to trying some of these recommendations.
Michelle
Hey Michelle,
Thanks for your positive feedback! We hope the tips in the post work for you– let us know how it turns out!
Is it because of the routine or because of the giveaways? I’d like to hear about another example not involving a giveaway.
Hey Janice,
The strategy works because of both the routine of it as WELL as giveaways. A great example of lasting routine-based social media efforts include Twitter’s popular “Follow Fridays” where Twitter users tweet out a message containing the Twitter names of some of their favorite people/brands to follow. In this way, when I’m reading through my Twitter stream and my favorite fitness cheerleader has tweeted that I MUST consider following @wildfireapp for all their interesting marketing advice, and I do and love it, I can count on every Friday referring back to the same person for their newest referrals of who the coolest people are on Twitter that I have to check out!
Hope that helped a little. :)
I certainly will. I’m going to subscribe to this blog and put it in my reader.
thanks
Michelle
Well, when I post I keep a couple of things in mind while creating the posts:
* Offering good quality content with an offer to sign up to my list in my resource area
* I do about a 75/25 ration of offering content and a product offer.
* Post regularly twice per week and only more if something comes up (ex: a freebie I heard about)
I have also created free pdf’s and small e-books related to my niche (ex: mini skin care guides by skin type) and given away on my blog.
My blog followers are small and it could be because I don’t have much traffic. But traffic sure picked up when I did the $25 worth of free product give away!
YET, no sales that have come from the blog. Little to no responses to my posts. I have no clue what I’m doing wrong.
Hey Michelle,
Thanks for sharing! Have you tried publicizing your blog in various channels? When we write a new post, we like to link to it through our Facebook Fan Page and then also our Twitter. We want people to see it, but we don’t always know where they are checking, right? Also, use your friends base on Facebook to see if they can help you by sharing with their friends. Word of mouth is so powerful.
Actually my blog posts feed automatically to Twitter and my Facebook Fan Page. I have a whole 30 fans :-)
I am going to start posting the posts to some of my ning groups and see if that will pick things up. I am also seriously considering a WordPress blog. I need to set it all up but have not had the time.
It is a good idea ! I will try it …
Thanks for your help.
Hey Isabelle,
Thanks for your feedback! We hope this effort works for you.
Thanks Wildfire, great post.
I’m always looking to build a bigger fan base on facebook and twitter for the upcoming launch of globetrooper.com. It’s quite hard to get the numbers up, but this sounds like a good strategy, I’m going to try and think of something that doesn’t include a give-away as we’re only a start-up and have limited resources.
A tip for others that got us 100+ fans in one day – create a photo contest where people upload their own photos and then others vote on them for the winner. Some of the people putting up photos will give a shout out to all of THEIR friends on facebook to go vote on their photo = more and more fans!
That’s a great tip, Lauren! Photo contests are especially interesting because users that upload their pictures want to win, and so are more inclined to spread the news to their friends in order to have their friends vote on that picture. Your tip is spot on!
Great Tip! It’ll be fun brainstorming to create a good weekly giveaway.
My only thing is I don’t want to start doing a bunch of contests and things that are totally unrelated to my business. Isn’t the idea to conduct events and drum up conversation related to your niche?
Routines really are crucial when it comes to social media- from both an internal and external perspective.
Each client’s social media account should have ‘windows of communication’ built in whereby they engage with their audience at set times. Once these are established it allows employees running the campaigns to manage their time appropriately and also ensure an account is not over/under serviced.
From an external perspective it is great to know when a company/brand you are interested in is going to engage so that you do not have to constantly check back. It is possible to create anticipation this way as fans wait for the latest tweets and updates.
Having a routine also has the additional benefit of making viral campaigns and a one-off ‘social media blitz’ more effective. Followers will have become accustomed to your routine and so when this changes and communication suddenly increases they are far more likely to sit up and take notice.
Tom McKenna
Tom,
This is a great tip! We definitely recommend routines also. Swell does a great job of that!
Oh and if you like my thoughts then check out my other social media and agency opinions at http://tommckenna347.wordpress.com/
Thanks,
Hi, just doing some browsing for my Billabong site. Lots of information out there. Not quite what i was looking for, but interesting page. Have a nice day.