Altimeter, a leading research and advisory firm in the technology space, just published a great report on Facebook Page marketing. While doing their research, they reached out to some of the industries leading experts on social media, Facebook marketing, and disruptive marketing technologies— one of these contributors was Wildfire! It was great to be able to add some of our knowledge about the social media marketing space to this great collection of research. Check it out below– the guidance you will find in this study is the freshest on the market, it is an excellent source to add to your knowledge base!’
Archive for the 'Tips & Tricks' Category
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
Many businesses are rushing to build up their Facebook ‘fan’ base, but what’s the value of a fan if you don’t know how to effectively message them and get their attention? Below are a series of very simple tips for how to get your Fan page status updates noticed. Special thanks are owed to the other panelists joining our CEO Victoria Ransom at the Web 2.0 expo session, “From Faceless to Fantastic,”where some of these tips were discussed (@ekaterinawalter, @ttaxchels, @smcilnay and @angelathp) and in particular to Jeff Widman at Brand Glue.
But first, you might be wondering why such tips are even necessary. Aren’t all status updates seen by fans? The short answer is, no. 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 algorythm 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 % of your fans in their Top News stream and there will therefore be a much higher likelihood that your fans will actually see your post than an update that gets few ‘Likes’ or ‘Comments’. So sending out posts that are highly engaging is extremely important to the success of your Facebook marketing strategy.
TRICK #1: Ask fans to ‘Like’ your update!
This may sound trivial, but it is hugely powerful – when you post an update out to your fans ask them to show their support by clicking on the ‘Like’ button of your post. For example, if you send an update about a new product feature instead of simply saying: “We’re excited to announce the release of our brand new navigation, ” say something like: “We’re excited to announce the release of our brand new navigation. Click the ‘Like’ button if you like this change”. We have tried this over and over again and on average we see 200-300% more ‘Likes’ when we make direct requests like this.
Check out the great engagement with this post-- 29 people indicated they "Like" it, which was likely aided by the direct prompt to do so right in the message!
TRICK #2: Encourage comments by asking yes/no questions
A powerful way to encourage comments is to ask your fans questions when you post an update. But you’ll get a much higher response rate if you ask questions that require very little effort to answer, like yes/no questions. For example, you’ll get far fewer comments if you ask “Tell us what you think of our new homepage design” than if you ask “Do you like our new homepage design – yes or no?”. Of course, if you’re looking for concrete feedback from your fans you may prefer the first approach, but if you are wanting maximum exposure for your post the latter approach will yield a significantly higher number of comments.
TRICK #3: Don’t use the Facebook links box!
You may have noticed that Facebook provides an option to attach a link to your fan page status updates. What you may not know is that you’ll generally get fewer clicks on your link if you use this feature rather than simply including a link in the body of your update.
Don’t do this…
- The link button outlined above will attach a link to your post, but its best to avoid using this tool, and just paste the link right into your text.
Try this instead…
- Pasting a link you wish to share with your users directly into your message has proven, with testing, to have a significantly higher user click rate!
TRICK #4: If you post your own videos, do use the Facebook video upload
Just as Facebook provides functionality to attach a link to your update, so too does it allow to you attach a video to your post. While we recommend against using this functionality when posting a link, we do recommend that you use the ‘attach‘ functionality to add your own videos to your updates. Why? If you upload your video via the Facebook ‘attach’ functionality it will automatically embed a ‘Like’ button into your video, thus giving you the opportunity to build your fans when people share your video. If you simply link to a video on YouTube or elsewhere there will be no ‘Like’ button automatically embedded in your video.
Try this out…
- Upload videos which you have on your computer using this uploader tool– it automatically inserts a “Like” button right into your video!
You get a cool feature with it!
- By uploading this video directly into the video uploader tool pictured above, users can now click directly on “Like” within the video as they watch.
TRICK #5: Target your messages to different segments of your audience.
Did you know that you can push out status updates that only specific segments of your fan base will see? For example, if you have a global business and you have an offer that is only relevant to your Canadian customers, you could push out a story that only your Canadian fans will see. Likewise, if you have Spanish speaking fans you could target them exclusively with an update written in Spanish. Right next to the “Share” button in the messaging box is a targeting tool– while the default targeting is “Everyone,” you can limit the outreach by location, all the way down to city/state and by language.
- If you have a message that you don’t need or want all of your users to see, you can customize who the message will be revealed to, by using the functionality built right in to the message box!
Target your message right down to the city!
- You can target you messages by location of your users, as deep as their city, and even the language they speak!
TRICK #6: Make it worth your fan’s while to look out for your updates!
Razorfish published a study awhile 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 and look forward to receiving your updates, you should reward them from time to time with special offers like coupons, giveaways, contests and more. We’ve seen companies that offer regular deals (e.g. Friday specials or Tuesday giveaways) build highly engaged fan bases. So why not get started by creating a promotion today 
If there’s one thing that our most successful clients (i.e. those who have the greatest number of engaged fans and followers) have in common it’s this: they consistently provide their audience with great reasons to engage. We’ve previously written about the power of running weekly or monthly promotions (e.g. weekly coupons or monthly giveaways), but another powerful way to consistently engage your audience is to center promotions around holidays (e.g. Valentines, Halloween, Easter, Christmas, Hanukkah etc).With many countries about to celebrate their National Holiday over the next couple of months (4th of July, French Independence Day, Swiss National Day etc) we thought we’d provide you with some creative ideas for ‘National Holiday’-themed promotions.
IDEA #1: Encourage word of mouth spread by offering The Ultimate Holiday Party
Run a sweepstakes to give away the ‘ultimate National Holiday party’ – food, drinks, and bbq included. But to make it more ’social’ and to encourage word-of-mouth spread, use our ‘group prize’ functionality and ask entrants to name the ‘5 people’ they’d invite to the party if they were to win.
IDEA #2: Drive daily engagement with a ‘count down’ sweepstakes
Encourage regular engagement leading up to the holiday by running a ‘count down’ sweepstakes (e.g. ‘Count down to 4th July’ or ‘30 days ’til Bastille Day’). For each day of the ‘count down’ award a daily prize like a gift card and then award one grand prize at the end of the promotion.
IDEA #3: Combine Holiday-Themed Virtual Gifts with Charitable Giving
Create a virtual gift campaign to enable friends to send each other free Holiday-themed virtual gifts (e.g. American flags, fireworks & party hats to celebrate 4th July). Combine this with an opportunity to ‘give back’ by offering to donate $1 to a charity of your choice for every gift sent.
IDEA #4: Encourage sharing by running a Holiday-themed Contest
Create a Holiday-themed contest where users submit their best fireworks photos, favorite 4th July recipes or pledges for what they plan to do to make their country better. Contests can be highly viral because each entrant will reach out to their friends and family to vote for their entry.
IDEA #5: Celebrate the Holiday by giving away ‘Mystery’ coupons
Many stores will offer coupons and deals to celebrate the 4th July or other National Holidays so why not use Wildfire Campaign Builder to provide a coupon on your fan page or website. To add more fun to your promotion, use our unique code upload functionality to offer a ‘mystery’ coupon, like the game retailer Hautelook created with Wildfire.
So you’ve built up your fan base and now you’re wondering what you can do to actually turn these fans into paying customers? Here are five clever ways that companies have used our platform to turn their Facebook Fans into customers….and the great thing is that via our platform any company, big or small, can run such campaigns for minimal cost and effort.
Tip #1: Turn your coupons into a game!
Online ‘private’ retailer Hautelook ran a coupon campaign with us but instead of just offering up a coupon they made it much more fun by creating an ‘instant win’ coupon game. After becoming a fan of the Hautelook Facebook Fan Page entrants were presented with a coupon but the value of each coupon was a surprise and ranged from 10% to 20%, and some had free shipping. The results were great! Not only did Hautelook generate thousands of new fans they also generated tens of thousands of sales in just one day. In fact, they generated a return on investment of more than 5x and over 20% of purchasers were first time Hautelook customers. The great thing about this campaign is that it turned something standard like a coupon into something fun and exciting like a game.
Tip #2: Drive People into your Store via a Giveaway
Giveaways are a great way to engage people and generate word of mouth, but by offering a giveaway that must be picked up in store it can also be a great way to drive purchases. Digital Surgeons, a digital marketing agency, used Wildfire to run a giveaway for their client Edible Arrangements. After becoming a Facebook Fan of Edible Arrangements entrants received a voucher for free chocolate dipped strawberries. But to redeem the coupon fans had to visit an Edible Arrangements store – thus providing a fantastic opportunity for local Edible Arrangements franchisees to promote their store to a slew of new customers. This campaign was a wild success for Edible Arrangements – not only did it generate 170,000 new fans but it also resulted in a double-digit increase in sales from the year prior.
Tip #3: Drive visitors to your online store via a creative sweepstakes
Zappos ran a unique sweepstakes with Wildfire where they promised users the chance to win a $500 voucher for use at Zappos, but only after entrants visited the online store and put together a list of the items that they would purchase with the winning money, if it were theirs. This was a powerful way to encourage thousands of people to not only visit the Zappos site but to also create a list of their favorite items on Zappos, which, in turn, encouraged many consumers to buy.
Tip #4: Create lucky coupons to draw users into your store
Jamba Juice launched a campaign called “Feel Good Bucks” that used Wildfire’s unique coupon code generation functionality in a very interesting way. They gave out ‘lucky’ coupons via our Facebook Connect Product and Facebook Fan Page Product that could be redeemed at Jamba Juice stores. When consumers redeemed the coupons they either received $1 off their purchase or they had the opportunity to win one of many thousands of instant prizes, including cash prizes of $10,000! To make Jamba’s campaign even more fun and social, they combined it with Wildfire’s Virtual Gifting solution so users could send Jamba Bucks to their friends in the form of fun, Jamba-branded virtual gifts like smoothies, bucks, and cartoons. By combining the utility of a coupon with the anticipation of an instant win and the social channels of Facebook, Jamba was able to generate huge interest in their campaign and drive tens of thousands of consumers to purchase at their stores.
Tip #5: Use a sweepstakes to drive people to your coupon
In celebration of its one millionth Facebook Fan, Duck Tape launched a Wildfire sweepstakes, giving 100 lucky winners a Duck Tape prize package. But to sweeten the deal for every entrant in the sweepstakes, they also put up a coupon for $1 off a roll of Duck Tape, which was available for claim to anybody completing their submission into the sweepstakes. Sweepstakes are not only a great way to encourage users to interact with your fanpage and website but they’re also a powerful way to drive people to your coupon or online shopping cart so it’s certainly worth considering the combination of a sweepstakes with a coupon.
You may have noticed a new Facebook ‘Like’ button popping up on many sites (e.g. CNN, ABC, Fandango, etc.) across the web, but what does this actually mean for your business? We’ve broken this new feature (the so-called Facebook “Open Graph”) down to it’s essentials so you can understand exactly what it means for your company and how to make the most of it in your marketing strategy.
In case you haven’t come across the new Facebook ‘Like’ buttons, see the example below. Any company can now display these Facebook ‘Like’ buttons on their website; read on to find out what they mean for you and how you can implement them.
Fact # 1: The ‘Like’ button enables you to build your Facebook fans
When someone clicks the ‘Like’ button on a website they essentially become a ‘Fan’ of that website. What this means is that the owner of this website can publish Facebook status updates to these consumers just as they currently do to fans of their Facebook Fan Page. So adding the ‘Like’ button to your website is a great way to convert your existing users into ‘Fans’ and to build an audience that you can regularly communicate with via Facebook status updates.
Fact # 2: The ‘Like’ button spreads the word about your website to friends of your website visitors
When someone clicks the ‘Like’ button a newfeed story is generated on Facebook. So if a visitor to your website clicks the ‘Like’ button and they have 250 Facebook friends, up to 250 people might be exposed to a message about this website visitor liking your company website. This is a very powerful way for you to utilize your website visitors to spread the word about your business to their friends.
Fact # 3: Clicking the ‘Like’ button adds your site to Facebook user profiles
When someone clicks the ‘Like’ button on your website, not only does a newsfeed get generated but a link also gets added to the ‘interests’ section of the person’s Facebook profile. So, for example, if I visit RottenTomatoes.com and click the ‘Like’ button on the Godfather movie page, the Godfather movie will automatically be listed among my favorite movies on Facebook. The interest topics on Facebook include: Interests, Music, Movies, Television, but even if your website doesn’t fit neatly into these categories it’ll still be listed under other ‘Likes’ and interests. This means that anyone visting the profile of a person who ‘liked’ your website can discover your business and click directly through to your website. This is an entirely new way for your business to get discovered.
Fact # 4: Users can ‘Like’ sub-topics on your website
You don’t just have to put one generic ‘Like’ button on your website; instead you can create ‘Like’ buttons for different sections or topics on your website. For example, if you own a travel website you could put a ‘Like’ button on your homepage for people to become ‘Fans’ of your website but you could also put a ‘Like’ button on each of the pages for your specific tours so people could ‘Like’ your Mexican Surfing Tour or your France Biking Tour. This enables you to have several very specific groups of fans that you can push highly targeted status updates to, such as all people who are fans of your surf tours or all people who are fans of your biking tours.
Fact # 5: In addition to the ‘Like’ button you can add a ‘Like’ activity widget
In addition to the ‘Like’ button Facebook makes it easy for you to add a like ‘box’ to your website which displays a live stream of all people who have ‘Liked’ or shared (“recommended”) on your website. For websites that get a lot of engagement, this is a great way to provide a ‘window’ into the activities of your various users. If you’re a smaller website with limited traffic keep in mind that the content in the ‘Like’ box is not likely to change very regularly so it may get a little ’stale’.
Fact # 6: It’s easy to install the ‘Like’ button & other Facebook widgets on your site
Adding the ‘like’ button and other Facebook widgets is easy – it’s simply a matter of pasting a line of code onto your website. If you’re not able to do this yourself, your webmaster will be able to do it in a matter of minutes. Here’s instructions for how to do this: http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like
Fact # 7: You still need to encourage people to ‘Like’ your brand
While the Facebook ‘Like’ button provides a great opportunity for you to get the word out about your business and to grow your ‘fan’ base it’s important to remember that unless you have a website with massive traffic and a super popular brand it won’t be enough for you to simply put a ‘Like’ button on your site. This will certainly help and is something that you should take the time to do, but you’ll still need to be proactive in encouraging people to ‘Like’ your brand. This, of course, is where Wildfire specializes – running contests, giveaways, and other Wildfire campaigns are some of the most powerful ways to grow your audience of ‘Fans/Likers’ and our platform makes it dead easy to run a promotion both on your Facebook Fan Page and on your website simultaneously.
Looking to make your Facebook promotions more effective? Facebook advertising, thanks to its highly targeted nature, can be one of the most effective ways for you to kick-start your promotion and ensure its success. Here are simple tips (some of which we learned directly from our meetings with Facebook) for how to improve the performance of your Facebook advertising. These are simple tips, but in some cases they can help you to almost double the success of your Facebook ad campaigns!
1) Ads Targetting Friends of Fans Double Your Ad Performance!
We learned from Facebook that the often overlooked ‘advertise to friends of your fans’ feature performs significantly better in terms of brand lift than regular Facebook ads. Why? If you advertise to the friends of your fans every single person viewing your ad will see that someone they know is already a fan of your brand (for example, if my friend Sally Baker is a fan of Bob’s Burgers the message ‘Sally Baker is a fan’ will appear beneath the Bob’s Burgers Facebook ad when I view it). As has been demonstrated many times before, people respond best to personal brand and product recommendations from their friends (in fact, a recent study by Morpace Research found that approximately 68% of Facebook users said that a positive Facebook friend referral would increase their chances of purchasing a product or visiting a retailer), so if every person viewing your ad campaign sees that at least one of their friends is associated with your brand the response will be dramatically higher. Now, you might be thinking ‘I only have 100 fans – if I advertise to friends of fans I won’t reach anyone’ – but keep in mind that on average each Facebook user has 130 friends. So if you advertise to friends of your fans and you have 100 fans you will be able to reach 13,000 of their friends. If you have 10,000 fans you’ll be able to reach 1.3MM of their friends!Additionally, a recent study by research and consulting firm Morpace found that approximately 68% of Facebook users said that a positive Facebook friend referral would increase their chances of purchasing a product or visiting a retailer. That is a very convincing statistic to support the effectiveness of advertising to friends of your fans.
Advertising to friends of fans is easy. When you set up your ad campaign on Facebook just select the “Target users whose friends are connected to” option (see screenshot below as an example).
Click to enlarge
2) Keep Users in Facebook for Best Results
While you can use a Facebook ad to point to anywhere on the web, your advertising will be dramatically more effective if you point to something within the Facebook site, like your Fan Page. Imagine yourself in the shoes of a user– you’ve come online to engage with your friends, profiles, photos and feeds and have become interested in an ad. But once you click, you’re removed from your Facebook experience and taken somewhere completely outside of it. Unless the new location you’ve come upon is especially compelling, or in some way satisfies the experience you came to Facebook to achieve, many users will immediately drop off the advertised site and return to Facebook. If, on the other hand, you point your Facebook ad to feature something within the network, the user is far more likely to engage with it. Many Facebook advertisers make the mistake of directing their ads to landing pages that have been optimized for Google AdWords, not Facebook. Even if you’d rather direct consumers outside of Facebook, keep in mind the reasons they’re in Facebook in the first place and direct them to a landing page that is consistent with the fun, social, authentic and engaging nature of Facebook.
3) Targeting “Likes & Interests” with Facebook
Facebook ads enable you to target consumers according to highly specific demographic and geographic information. But why stop at age groups, location, or gender? You can make sure that your ad only displays to people who have explicitly stated somewhere in their profile that they share a particular “like” or “interest” that aligns with your ad.
For example, in setting up this sample ad for the Chocolate Bakery not only can you target US females between the ages of 25 and 55 (the target demographic for the Chocolate Bakery), you can also target people who list the following ‘likes’ in their Facebook profile: “chocolate cake,” “fudge,” “cookies,” and “chocolate”. Facebook shows that over one million users fit this very specific set of criteria so that’s one million sets of highly targeted eyeballs to potentially reach with your ad!
Click to enlarge
4) Brick and Mortar Business? Get Local with your Advertising!
If you have a business that is in a brick and mortar location or primarily serves customers from a certain region, you can drill down to very specific location targets with Facebook advertising. You can even get as close as a 10 mile radius of your city! Now that’s localizing.
Click to enlarge
You may think that all social media marketing promotions are the same– after all, how creative can you really get with a coupon, or a contest, or even a sweepstakes?
The answer is: extremely. At Wildfire, we’ve seen a great many promotions run by brands big and small, everything from chocolate cake by mail to hundreds of cute babies and cuter pets. But the following five campaigns, all run by large multinational brands and companies, have been especially innovative in their approach and the interesting use of social media marketing. While these promotions have all been run by some of our large brand clients as white label campaigns, stay tuned to the Wildfire blog in the coming weeks for our similar profiling of innovative promotions run by smaller businesses!
1. President Obama Uses Social Media Marketing to Promote Foreign Relations
The U.S. Embassy in Jakarta used Wildfire to run a promotion on their Facebook Fan Page to excite Indonesian fans about President Obama’s upcoming visit to the country. Users could pick their favorite cultural foods and clothing items to suggest the President sample and wear while he is visiting and then enter a sweepstakes to win tickets to attend one of the events. After running for just short of a month, the campaign generated 12,000 sweepstakes entries and over 43,000 interactions with the promotion in general, with people choosing their favorite item in some or all three of the cultural options, and the entering the sweeps.
This was a highly creative way for the U.S. State Department to generate interest among young Indonesians in the President’s visit and the best part is that they got the campaign up and running in just over a week and with a minimal budget.
2. Jamba Juice Creates Jamba Bucks, issuing users coupons worth $1 to $10,000
Jamba Juice launched a campaign called “Feel Good Bucks” that used Wildfire’s unique coupon code generation functionality in a very interesting way. They gave out ‘lucky’ coupons via our Facebook Connect Product and Facebook Fan Page Product that could be redeemed at Jamba Juice stores. When consumers redeemed the coupons they either received $1 off their purchase or they had the opportunity to win one many thousands of instant prizes, including cash prizes of $10,000! To make Jamba’s campaign even more fun and social, they combined it with Wildfire’s Virtual Gifting solution so users could send Jamba Bucks to their friends in the form of fun, Jamba-branded virtual gifts like smoothies, bucks, and cartoons. By combining the utility of a coupon with the anticipation of an instant win and the social channels of Facebook, Jamba was able to generate huge interest in their campaign, distributing tens of thousands of coupons and driving around 95,000 consumers to redeem coupons.
3. EA Games uses Wildfire to Power the “Perfect Kill”
EA Games is encouraging fans of the popular video game Dead Space to “Design a Kill” for the game’s sequel, Dead Space 2 . Entrants can submit their visions of a perfect kill sequence and the public can vote on their favorite entries. The winning entry will be built into the Dead Space 2 game and will feature the likeness of the winner. EA Games created the promotion using Wildfire’s essay, photo, and video contest solution. By allowing for a variety of submission formats (i.e. video, photo and/or text) EA catered to a wide variety of entrants – if creating and editing a video seemed too difficult to one, they had the option to instead submit an image or a written description of their kill. Some of the entries are not for the squeamish–EA really got into the hearts and heads of their fans, some of whom acted out entire kill sequences in front of a camera, and others who even created their own CGI movies!
4. Gatorade Commemorates Michael Jordans Induction into the Hall of Fame with Vote for Favorite MJ Moments
Gatorade teamed up with Wildfire to commemorate Michael Jordan’s induction into the Basketball Hall Of Fame with a campaign on the Gatorade Fan Page which allowed users to vote for their favorite MJ moment from a collection submitted by some of the industry’s top sports writers. By combining a voting campaign with a sweepstakes, Gatorade was able to get the best of both world’s — a powerful way to spread the word about their brand throughout Facebook (voters broadcast their opinion about the best Michael Jordan ‘moment’ by publishing newsfeeds and sharing with their friends) and to generate leads (sweepstakes entrants provided valuable data and contact information to Gatorade). The campaign generated tens of thousands of votes and exposed hundreds of thousands of Facebook users to the Gatorade brand.
5. Right Guard and the Phoenix Suns Team Up for a Doubly Branded Sweepstakes Promotion
The Phoenix Suns took advantage of Wildfire’s Multiple Fan Feature to kill two birds with one stone –grow their fan base and that of their sponsor, Right Guard. The Suns on the Road Sweepstakes had a grand prize of winning a trip and tickets to see the Phoenix Suns play at Golden State, but instead of requiring entrants to become a fan of the Phoenix Suns page only, entrants were also required to become fans of Right Guard. Right Guard was able to benefit from the positive association with the Suns and the the Phoenix Suns were able to use Facebook to add value in a new way for their sponsor. To give the campaign an added level of interest, the Sun’s also provided a quiz for fans to find out which Phoenix Suns “Legend” player they’re most like, which encouraged the publication of newsfeeds and further spread the word about the Suns and Right Guard.
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!
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.
