2.17.2012

Social Media Secrets

By Jeanette Montgomery


In our earlier issue, we looked into the methods on how you can get people to like your Facebook business page. In this issue, we will focus on how you can make use of promotions, contests, and giveaways to get more individuals.

Using a social media management site entirely for promotions, contests and giveaways is a fantastic way to determine whether these said marketing tactics is working for your business. The site allows anyone to find out the number of traffic that comes to their page.

This can be a double win situation too because making the promotion exclusive will gather a new set of Facebook fans which is essential to the development and maintenance of the company's social network page. Contests are quite helpful in catching the interest of Facebook users.

Now that you know this, let's move on to how you can implement Facebook marketing and go about making traffic-pulling contests and promos.

The very first thing you'd want to do is to be sure that the updates and contest mechanics are only accessible to your Facebook users. The small business must not promote it in emails, newsletters, other social networks or even in their official website other than saying that the promotion is exclusive to Facebook users, of course. As an additional requirement, the mechanics have to be simple and clear. Overcomplicating matters would make contestants think you've set the bar too high and can discourage them from joining.

As an early notice, contests, incentives and promotions tend to be pricey as the apps needed to create and run it are also expensive. For example, the application Wildfire has a $5 setup fee and charges $0.99 for each day the campaign runs. Furthermore, Facebook is quite strict as to which contests are allowed to run in their network. In general terms, nearly all competitions are not even allowed. You won't be able to post an official contest in your Facebook wall.

However certain exceptions are at hand. Any business that wants to run contests in Facebook must first purchase at least $10,000 worth of Facebook ads in just three months.

For businesses that are able to use prize draws, there are several of business app that help design these. Wildfire offers all the necessary tools to create photos, videos, and graphic entries to develop a contest campaign. What's more, this application is easily customizable. You can change campaign mechanics, deadlines of contests, the number of votes allowed per person and the level of participation of your network. To make navigation convenient, consider placing a contest widget in your Fan Page so the competitors will be able to link directly to a mini site. There are also other contest builder tools like Vertigo and Strutta.

To ensure that the contest is prosperous, you should offer captivating offers. As an example, Regus, a work place supplier ran a contest campaign and offered a fully furnished office for the photo entry that showed the messiest work area. But you shouldn't stop there. More unique prizes include dinner with celebrities or a chance to attend a star-studded party.

A productive contest will bring in a lot of leads for the company and will help them communicate with their consumers at a very personal level despite the online medium. Despite the expenses and additional effort, jobs such as these are really worth it if only for the brownie points you win with present and potential customers.

Be sure to read our next issue of Facebook for Business.We are going to talk about a few tips for making money on Facebook.




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