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.
There has been a lot of big news from Facebook over the past few days and while the reaction from consumers and developers has been mixed, the news for Fan Page owners is exciting! To begin with, the action of ‘becoming a fan’ will now be dramatically more viral because every time someone becomes a fan of your brand a newsfeed will automatically be published (e.g. “Joe became a fan of XYZ Brand”). This means that for every person that fans your Page, potentially hundreds of their friends will be exposed to your brand and many of them may choose to become your fan also. For Fan page owners, this will result in even greater brand exposure and should make it easier to build your fan base. Of course, you still need to give Facebook users a reason to want to become a fan of your brand – that’s where Wildfire’s tools can be so powerful (FYI, last week we launched a campaign for a nationwide gifts company that generated 100K fans in just 4 days!).
In one of our last posts we gave you tips on how to create engaging, viral campaigns. But creating an engaging campaign is just one piece of the puzzle; equally important is coming up with campaigns that meet your business goals. There are many easy ways you can do this – if your goal is to drive sales, consider combining a coupon with your campaign (e.g. after entrants have entered your sweepstakes, quiz or contest use our coupon solution to provide them with a discount voucher). If your goal is to educate consumers about your products, weave this into your sweepstakes entry process (e.g. Zappos ran a shopping spree sweepstakes with us which required entrants to choose the clothing items they’d want to win from zappos.com and then input the clothing SKU numbers into the sweepstakes entry form). User generated contests are also powerful ways to educate consumers about your brand (e.g. Facebook ran a contest with us that required entrants to submit stories about how Facebook is doing good in their community) and so too are quizzes (e.g. check out the 
