7 Strategies for Marketing your Facebook Fan Page Promotions

You’ve taken the time to create a fun, engaging promotion for your users and fans, and you’ve set it up to run from right inside your Facebook Fan Page. The campaign just went live.  Now, you can sit back and wait for it to spread in a viral way, right? Well, not quite.

Creating a promotion and sitting back to “hope for the best”  will not lead to success. Unless you’re one of the lucky multi-national companies who seem to have infinite brand awareness and tons of fans who send news on its merry viral way instantly, you’re going to have to kickstart the spread yourself a bit. Here are some of our favorite advertising strategies that will help you do that…and the good news is, many of these wont cost you penny!

1. Messaging Your Fan Base

If you have an existing fan base, the first thing you should do is reach out to them by posting to your wall multiple times during the promotion. This will not only provide your existing fans with a compelling reason to visit your fan page and engage with your brand, but it will also enable them to spread the word about your promotion to their friends. It’s easy to post a compelling update about your promotion to your fan base– Check out this detailed Wildfire tutorial about how to publish a feed about your promotion right to your Fan Page wall!

We recommend that you message your fans at least three times throughout the promotion – once as soon as you launch, once mid-way through the promotion and once a few days before it ends to remind your fans that time is running out. You should also be thoughtful about when you message your fans. For example, if your most of your fans are from the United States, be sure to post during times that North Americans are most likely to be online. Arbor Networks, an internet security firm, has done several interesting studies around what times North Americans and Europeans go online.

Check out how Chocolate Bakery, who published a sweepstakes themed around March Madness, posted the news to their Fan Page wall as soon as the promotion went live. Their fans see the update in their newsfeed, and can comment and “like” it on the wall. Additionally, posting to your wall more than once is ideal, because not all users look through their Facebook pages daily or at the same time. Try to comment and message your Fan Page wall at different times of the day to reach the most people.

2. Enlist the Help of Your Friends

Don’t have any fans to promote your campaign to? Why not kick-start your campaign by enlisting the help of your friends? Post a feed story to your personal Facebook profile so all your Facebook friends learn about your campaign. Ask your friends and colleagues to do the same, and if they just copy and paste your statement, it should then take less than 30 seconds and will enable you to reach hundreds or even thousands of people.

3. Sending Out an Email Update

If you have a mailing list for your company, send out an email to your subscribers encouraging them to enter your campaign. Promotions such as coupons or giveaways provide a strong incentive for your readers to open the newsletter, especially if you send them out on a regular and thus expected schedule. This is also a powerful way for you to turn your existing newsletter subscribers into fans of your Facebook page.

4. Update your Twitter

Speaking of Twitter, you should promote your campaign through it too! Tweet out messages in 140 characters or less, and use link shorteners like bit.ly or tinyURL to recreate the long URLs to your campaigns into short, Twitter friendly versions. Bit.ly is extra useful because it tracks the clicks your shortened link receives, so if you wanted to measure the results of your linking, it’s easy to set up a free account.

5. Targeted Advertising

You can use targeted advertising on Facebook to drive users to your campaign. It takes 5 minutes to set up your ad and you can target users according to age, gender, geography and other criteria. For example, did you know you can target your “Best Web Design” contest to people who, in their Facebook profiles, wrote that they are employed as Web Designers, or like Web Design, or any interests you could list in a Facebook profile? Facebook ads make it easy to get as specific as you need, to reach out to potentially like minded people to see your promotion.

6. Register your Contest or Sweepstakes in Online Directories

There are many websites that are dedicated to the tracking and indexing of huge lists of running contests and sweepstakes, and they have dedicated user bases who check the new listings every day, to see the daily changing lists of prizes they could win at various places. Consider registering your sweepstakes or contest with some of these sites–it’s usually free to list in exchange for you to link to the index on your web page, but even this is usually optional. Being tracked by such indexes could be a great way to pull in a group of users who are by nature, or by hobby, highly engaged with promotions.

7. Reach Out to Popular Bloggers

If your brand is part of a social category, like video games, or parent blogging, or cooking groups for example, try reaching out to recognized personal bloggers in that industry. Often, these talented writers have large followings of readers who trust their opinion and will check out a promotion if the blogger endorses it with a mention. For example, McMommy, a popular parenting blogger from Florida tweeted out her participation in a Cadillac promotion for charity. 24 hours later, her most engaged Twitter followers brought her vote tally from 65 (when we first voted for her after reading her tweet) to 665 (when we checked the counts the day after). Now that’s being social.

There are lots of methods to spreading the word about your promotion, and these 7 just happen to be some of the favorites we recommend. Share your favorite ways to market your Wildfire promotions with us in the comments!