Friday, December 16, 2011

How Can You Increase Your Social Media Fans With The Help Of Captivating Deals And Give-Aways

By Sara Owens


In our earlier issue, we discovered the methods on how to get individuals to like your Facebook business page. Today, we will be discussing about utilizing advertising campaigns, challenges and give-aways to attract more fans.

Utilizing a social media management site purely for promotions, contests and giveaways is a great way to determine whether these said advertising tactics is working for your business. The site allows anyone to find out the amount of traffic that comes to their page.

The rewards of this are two-fold since making the advertisement exclusive will bring in a new set of fans which is always important when trying to create online presence. Contests engage more people to your page.

Now that you know this, let's proceed to how you can implement Facebook marketing and start making traffic-pulling contests and promos.

Well, to start, you have to make certain that all contest mechanics and update are visible 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 easy to understand. 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 costly as the applications needed to produce 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, the vast majority of competitions are not even made possible. 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 just three months.

For businesses that are able to use contests, there are a lot of business app that help produce these. 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 contribution of your network. For easier navigation, you can place in a contest widget in your Fan page in order for participants to link straight to a micro site. There are also other contest builder tools like Vertigo and Strutta.

To assure that the contest is successful, you should offer eye-catching incentives. 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. 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 monitored successfully will definitely bring in lots of prospects to the organization. For some small businesses, tasks like these may need a large amount of attention. However, this can be among the list of most powerful techniques to raise business awareness on Facebook.

Be sure to read our next issue of Facebook for Business.We will talk about a very interesting topic: Monetizing on Facebook!




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