When it comes to building engaged fans and followers on Facebook or Twitter, promotions like contests, coupons, sweepstakes and giveaways should be #1 on your priority list. According to Jupiter, a market research company, brands that run contests have twice as many fans as those that don’t. According to Razorfish’s FEED study, by far the biggest reason that consumers fan or follow companies is to access deals and exclusive offers. But how can you maximize the success of your Facebook and Twitter promotions? Check out Part 1 of our two-part blog post detailing the top tips we’ve learned from observing the tens of thousands of promotions that have been run via the Wildfire social media marketing platform.
TIP # 1: MAKE IT SOCIAL
The power of Facebook and Twitter is that they enable users to share your brand with their friends. So to really make the most of Facebook and Twitter, you should look for ways to make your promotions inherently social. For example:
● If you’re running a user generated contest be sure to allow the public to vote. Entrants will contact all their friends to encourage them to vote and thus help spread the word about your brand.
● If you are running a sweepstakes, make it social by offering a Group Prize (e.g. “concert tickets for you and your 5 best friends”) and ask entrants to invite the 5 friends they’d want to share the prize with or offer a Referral Prize (e.g. award a prize not only to the winner but also to the person who referred the winner).
Check out an example of a currently running Group Deal that’s highly social,the W Scottsdale Group Deal– a certain number of people are needed to get the deal, so if a user wants to purchase the deal, he will want to share it with friends to reach the deal tipping point!
TIP # 2: KEEP IT SIMPLE & EASY
In our experience, the simpler and easier you make it for consumers to engage with your promotion, the better your results will be. For example, if you’re running a sweepstakes, don’t ask for any more information from users than you need – the shorter the entry form or the less steps required to engage, the more people will enter. If you’re looking to collect user generated content, ask for things that consumers have readily available like vacation, pet, hobby or family photos. And if you run a video contest, be aware that these get far fewer entries than photo contests because of the effort required to create and upload a video. On the flip side, generating a few great video entries may serve your goals better than receiving hundreds or thousands of photo entries – especially if your goal is to create customer generated content that you can use in your marketing materials.
Pictures of a user making a funny face are easier to take and submit than creating a whole video.
Pictures of a user making a funny face are easier to take and submit than creating a whole video.
TIP # 3: TAP INTO PASSIONATE COMMUNITIES
We’ve found that campaigns that tap into people’s passions and interests play a greater role in determining the success of a campaign than do factors like the value of a prize or even, in many cases, the size of an advertising budget. Campaigns that involve pets, children, charities, hobbies (e.g. surfing), music, and other interests are consistently among the most successful we see. For example, we had a non-profit run a pet-related photo contest that got over 10,000 photo submissions in one week with no advertising budget and a tattoo parlor that got thousands of submissions to their ‘best tattoo contest’ with limited marketing. Target your ads to your specific demographic for best results.
The P90X promotion generated hundreds of entries from people passionate about working out and staying fit.
TIP # 4: COMMUNICATE!
Once your promotion is up and running, don’t forget to publicize it to your existing fans, followers and newsletter subscribers on a regular basis. At a minimum, message your fans once when you launch the promotion, once during the middle of the promotion and once a few days before it ends. For highly successful tips to ensure that your fan updates get maximum exposure, click here: http://bit.ly/bOYnE8
We’re trying lots of things along these lines and trying to get traction but just not getting it fast enough. We really want to get to a minimum of 500k fans by December for diet season.
What do you think we could be doing better?
http://www.facebook.com/pages/weightlosswars/343870350263
We run giveaways about once every week or so.
We are trying to make it viral!
Hey Jeff,
Thanks for your message! You have built a really large fan base, which is great! The one thing I noticed when I got on your page is that, as a person who is not already a fan, the first thing I see is your wall. This doesn’t leave me very engaged, as I don’t really want to read through all the updates without having some incentive or motivation to keep up with you. With Fan Pages, you can actually set a different tab to show to people who are NOT fans, visiting your page. In this way, you could grab them in with a promotion, or a campaign, and THEN they fan you and become interactive with your wall…
Let me know if that works for you if you try it!
Dear Maya-
I have been doing a lot with Facebook since I started My Stock Rocks. I like your landing page idea! What do you see that I could improve upon at a glance? I can’t seem to get anyone to interact with my page?
Hey Kenny!
You probably know what I will say. Run a campaign! There’s no better way to draw people to a place then to tell them that they can win something. Create a campaign around some compelling prize and spread the word! Best of luck to you!
hi maya – we launched a sweepstakes on our page via our wildfire account but its not showing up under our promotions tab. any idea why?
Hi Altru,
Thanks for your message! You still need to sync up your app to your wildfire account. You can do this from your fan page profile– go to “Edit Page” under the fan page profile pic. Scroll to where you see the sweepstakes app (if you do not have it, you would need to add it to your page by finding the app on Facebook and clicking “add to page”). Click “Edit” under there. You will be prompted to log in with your Wildfire email and Wildfire password. Once this is complete, click “Add to Fan Page.” Once you see a green check mark, you should be all set!
Hope that helps!
ok i will try that. we’ve already done one campaign which was visible through the “promotions” app that is linked to our page & wildfire account. that’s where i assume this campaign would show up again!
Hey Altru,
Yes, your campaign can show up there again. But remember, each time you publish a new campaign, you have to tell your Facebook page to re-sync with your Wildfire account to re-sync the new information you’ve created there. You can do this within your fan page, by clicking “Edit Page” underneath the profile picture and finding the “Promotions” app, clicking edit, and logging in with your Wildfire email and password. There, you can make sure the new campaign is added to your fan page. Hope that helps!
Maya-
Yes, thanks running a campaign is probably the best thing to do, however, what kind of prize do you find works given the stats you have available? Obviously I’d run a photo contest! Maybe a $50 gas cards?
Thanks
Kenny
Hey Kenny,
Anything you can think of that has mass appeal to people– its no surprise that “iPad Giveaways” get so much hype! Visa gift cards, and gas cards should be enticing as well! Let us know how it goes for you!
Good stuff guys. All very practical stuff that is not hard to pull off. One of the biggest errors I find is that brands make people run through hoops. Things like submit an essay or create a video of yourself using our product. People have liited time and if the goal is to get more likes that then allow you to communicate and converse on an ongoing basis, short and simple always does better.
Hey Greg,
Thanks for your message! We agree with the hoops thing…every once in a while, you will find a hoops promotion that did extremely well, whether the users were super engaged, or united within that community that they are really passionate about…but more often than not, hoops strategies just turn out in lesser results than the campaign could have expected if it were a little easier to engage with.
Thanks for writing in! Keep coming back, we like the company! :)
Thanks for the tips. What would you suggest as a promo for giving away a few tickets to a well known 3-day dance event? Pictures or video don’t sound practical. Hmm… the Referral Prize seems to be a good match… do you have any stats how long a promo like this should run?
Hey Luis,
Sweepstakes are always a good option for giving things away, as you collect information from your users in exchange for a place in the sweeps. Typical running time for any campaign run on Wildfire is usually around a month–any more than that and the campaign starts to seem stale, les than that and it may not have enough time to spread socially.
Thanks for your kind feedback about the post, we really appreciate it!
We’re running a big promotion with a number of partners this winter to promote our winter mountain bike getaways (http://sacredrides.com). The grand prize will be a mountain bike trip for two to Guatemala, Chile or Mexico, including a free bike, bike clothing and GoPro camera.
We’d like to use Wildfire to run the promo but not sure how the sweepstakes could be maximized since the giveaway is only for two people. We can’t realistically give away five spots on a trip since that would cost us too much. Any thoughts?
Also, wondering how to set up the code for a landing page on Facebook that requires you to Like the page to see other content. I know how to use FBML to create a page, just not sure how to set it up so that you only see the landing page the first time, and need to click on Like to get to the rest of the content. Is there a blog post somewhere about this?
Hey Maya,
Great article. I am developing a social media strategy for a magazine in LA and was planing on basing some of the campaigns on a give away model. I was wondering if you have any tips on how to keep track of the number of references that people give you on things like a Facebook fan page over the course of a give away? Can it be attributed and tracked to a single user, or would you suggest a different approach in a give away?
Hey Dylan,
Thanks for your message! What do you mean by references? If you are meaning that you are thinking about giving people extra entries in return for their making comments on your Fan Page or otherwise doing something on your Fan Page like posting a photo, I would caution against that. It’s important to remember that Facebook promotions guidelines expressly forbid this, see this quote: “You cannot: Condition entry in the promotion upon a user providing content on Facebook, such as making a post on a profile or Page, status comment or photo upload.” You can be sure, though, that when you run a promotion on the Wildfire platform, that our technology and the way it functions is fully compliant with those guidelines. Thus, if you run a promo giveaway on Wildfire, you can keep track of all your entrants through your Wildfire account, where all the leads data will aggregate for you. Hope that helps!
Maya,
thanks for the response,
No, that was not my intention when I said references.
by “references” I meant is there a way to track the number of people that a “fan” suggests your page to. Thus, being able to award those that suggest your fan page to the highest number of “referrals” (their friends) to your fan page. So lets say you set up a contest where the person to suggest the most friends, that directly translated into fans, would be the winner of some prize. Do you know of a way to track this type of data?
Can you run a joint promotion with 2 Fan Pages? eg Enter the Sweepstakes to enter you must be a fan of both pages as a condition of entry?
I am looking to run a sweepstakes promotion for a sports club and a sponsor that wants to recruit fans from the sports club.
Hey Sean!
Yes, you can run a promotion with dual sponsors and require a double like. At this time, this feature is only available with a white label campaign. Here is a blog post we wrote about it, I think you will like the read! http://blog.wildfireapp.com/2010/03/08/new-multiple-become-a-fan-feature/
With best regards,
Maya