Tuesday, November 1, 2011

You Can Increase Your Social Media Fans By Utilizing Captivating Deals And Give-Aways

By Joann Bailey


In our previous issue, we discovered the methods on how to get people to like your Facebook business page. In this issue, we will focus on how you can take advantage of promotions, contests, and giveaways to draw in more individuals.

Utilizing a social media management site entirely for promotions, contests and giveaways is a very good way to gauge whether these said advertising tactics is working for your company. 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 garner a new set of Facebook fans which is essential to the growth and maintenance of the company's social network page. Contests indulge more people to your page.

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.

Well, to begin with, you have to ensure that all contest mechanics and update are accessible to Facebook users alone. Be certain that you don't promote it in your newsletters, social networks or even in the official website. You can however say that the contest is exclusive for Facebook users only. Also, it's important that the mechanics are simple to implement. Complicated mechanics will discourage your fans to join.

Take note that offering contests, incentives and promos can be a bit costly as these require some Facebook applications and other programs for them to run smoothly. For example, the application Wildfire has a $5 setup fee and charges $0.99 for each day the campaign runs. In addition to that, Facebook has strict rules when it comes to running prize draws within their network. Generally, a lot of different contests are not even allowed. You are not allowed to have an official contest posted in your wall.

There are some exceptions though. Any business that wants to run contests in Facebook must first purchase at least $10,000 worth of Facebook ads within three months.

In order to cut costs, there are plenty of business applications which can assist you in producing a contest for your Fan page. Wildfire provides all the necessary tools to create photos, videos, and graphic entries to develop a contest campaign. You can also customize your campaign as much as you want with these tools. You can alter campaign mechanics, deadlines of contests, the number of votes allowed per person and the level of response of your network. To make navigation very easy, consider placing a contest widget in your Fan Page so the competitors will be able to link directly to a mini site. Other platform providers include Strutta.com and Vertigo.

To really draw in a lot of participants, make sure you offer incentives which people can't resist. A company named Regus, for instance, offered a fully equipped office for the photo entry which showed the messiest work space. See this as a model when coming up with your own contest. Think of prizes such as tickets to the most sough-after concert in town.

A contest that's maintained successfully will surely generate lots of qualified prospects to the organization. Despite the expenses and additional hard work, ventures such as these are well 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 will talk about a very exciting topic: Money making on Facebook!




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