3 Easy Ways to Run Super Social Promotions on your Fan Page

You’re a social media marketing manager that’s used all the Wildfire tips to build up a great group of fans and followers. What’s next?

Now you need to start focusing on actively engaging your fans over a sustained period of time. An active fan is one who has an interactive relationship with a brand and, at least once a month, reacts to posts on the brand page, indicates a “liking” for various content, re-posts a brand’s messages or creates original content on the page.

To understand what makes fans return to your page, we need to ask why they committed to it in the first place. Razorfish published a study some time ago that asked consumers why they fan and follow brands. The greatest percentage of people, by far, responded “for the exclusive deals & offers”. So if you want your fans to watch out for your updates, you should reward them from time to time with special offers like coupons, giveaways, contests and more. We’ve seen that companies that offer regular deals (e.g. Friday specials or Tuesday giveaways) build highly engaged fan bases.

One easy way to promote interaction is to build in an extra social dimension into the Wildfire promotions you run— here are three easy ways to run super social promotions on your fan page.

The most social promotion of all?

Contests are at the heart of social promotions, and designing successful ones from an engagement perspective is not easy.  We’ve analyzed the entry and interaction metrics for thousands of promotions, and have come up with some recommendations for highly engaging ones.

Contests which encourage users to submit content they have created themselves are inherently more social, as most people who enter their self-created content into a contest also want to share their entry with friends and family. Entrants submit their original work (e.g. photo, video, essay, recipe, t-shirt design, etc.) and wait to find out whether it’s a winner. Even better, most contests contain a voting element, where the entrant is incentivized to rally his friends and family to vote on his submission (sometimes daily!) to increase his chances of winning.

The best part of running a contest is that the sharing opportunities are fourfold: the public can submit entries, vote on other entries, comment on submissions and share their favorite entries to their friends; all of these activities generate individual newsfeed items and help to spread the word about the promotion to that user’s friends. Newsfeed items are particularly important to consider, since not all newsfeed items are shared equally! Facebook uses an algorithm to determine which updates and stories will appear in a given person’s newsfeed. While no one knows exactly what this algorithm is (besides Mark Zuckerberg!), it largely depends on how much engagement a particular story receives. So, if you send an update out to your fans and it receives a lot of ‘Likes’ or ‘Comments’, it will be exposed to a much higher percentage of your fans in their Top News stream. So sending out posts that are highly engaging is extremely important to the success of your Facebook marketing strategy.

Check out the example below for a super social contest that encouraged sharing through user generated content and audience voting.

Rethink traditional sweepstakes— make it a socially motivated sweepstakes!
Sure, traditional sweepstakes don’t seem to be inherently social…when you think about the setup, there is one pool of potential winners, and the more people that enter their names into the pool, the less a chance any one of them has to win. Because of this, there is no built in reason for entrants to share news of the promotion to their friends. But what if you threw in a social element? As with the example below, you could set up the prize so that it is awarded to a group— one in which the winner and three of her friends ALL win an all-expenses-paid girls’ night on the town. The only catch is that in order to win, all three of the girlfriends’ names need to be on the entrant list too. If any one of the girls gets chosen, then, the entire group gets the prize! Now, every entrant has a built in incentive to share, because if they don’t, they’re less likely to win the prize.

Drive sales, in groups!
With a Group Deal any business, whether it’s a large brand, an agency or a small or medium sized business, can easily and cost-effectively sell its product or service in a socially engaging way on Facebook or on its website. You have probably heard of the awesome success of companies like Groupon that make buying fun and social by tying activation of hugely discounted deals to the amount of people who claim them. You can launch your own Wildfire Group Deals promotion within minutes and publish it on your fan page and/or website. Group deals are the ideal way to make buying both fun and social! Better yet, with Wildfire Group Deals, merchants keep all the revenue they make from user purchases— no need to give a portion away to anyone.

Next time you run a promotion for your fans, consider whether you’ve crafted it to be as social as possible. You’ve seen with the tips above that even traditional promotion types can be jazzed up with extra social elements that you can control when you build your promotion! Do you have other ways of building in more sharing incentives to your promotions? Share them in the comments!