Running your first social media contest? Should you even be running a social media contest? What are your goals of the contest? These are all questions and concerns you should be having before running your first social media contest.
After running a few social media contests and reading other social media experts thoughts and experiences with their contests, I have compiled some thoughts on what I think is most important to consider when running your contest:
1) Why are you running the contest in the first place?
Do you want to increase the amount of “Likes” on your Facebook page
Increase the number of followers to your twitter account
Launch a new product or brand
Add emails to your email list
Choose what type of contest to run:
2) Figure out the best type of contest to engage your audience, but also to achieve your overall goalThe easier the contest (sweepstakes, “Like” a Facebook page, Retweet a tweet), the more people will enter, but the less engagement the consumer will have with your brand
On the reverse side, the more engagement it takes to enter a contest (submitting photos or videos, scavenger hunts) the less people will actually join the contest, but the contestants that do join will engage more with your brand
The most important aspect of the contest is that it is easy to enter and easy for people to share
3) Don’t just use Social Media medium to promote the contest:
Facebook rolled out a new feature last week: the ability for users to tag a Fan Page in their photos. So just like you already tag your friends in a photo, you can now also tag the designer of your friend’s shirt. Or the store where it came from. Or the type of liquor in the drinks everyone’s holding. Or the band whose show you were all at. …You get the picture. (Ha, the picture… see what I did there?)
This opens up an opportunity for brands to connect with their customers in new ways. While likes of a Fan Page are highly valued, marketers share a universal challenge of knowing how to gauge each like’s true value. But Fan Page photo tags take things a step further since they empower fans to show themselves actually interacting with a given brand. And a link to a brand page that appears underneath an image of a group of happy friends is going to be more compelling than a link preceded by plain text that just says “Billy likes…”
Before you start immediately inviting photo tags on your Fan Page, there are a few key things to note—good and bad—about the new feature:
Anyone can tag a Fan Page; users are not currently limited to only the Pages they already “like”
The tagged photo appears in the Page’s “photos” tab, not on the Page’s wall
But, because of individual privacy settings, most users’ photos probably won’t even get that far. They’ll only be visible to their own friends (unless they have photos set to be visible to “everyone”)
Social media is a huge part of marketing these days, and a great way to reach out and captivate your audience. When utilizing these channels there are some important steps you should take to make sure you cover all the bases when continuing to develop your brand on these networks.
So you have an active Facebook page… check. You’re active on Twitter… check. But what about Youtube? Do you have a channel set up? Youtube channels are a necessity these days, and there is much more that you can do to your channel than just uploading videos. Just check out the new promotion Dreamworks is running for the new Kung Fu Panda 2 movie coming out. And MAKE SURE you click for epicness at the end of the first video..
Branding Your Youtube Channel
Not every business has hundreds of thousands of dollars to dedicate to developing Youtube Pages like Dreamworks does. However, all businesses should want their Youtube channel to be cohesive with their brand, and Youtube makes their channels fairly customizable to allow you to do so.
The first step is to change the colors on your channel to represent your brand and drop in a custom background image. Get creative with your Youtube background! You have the opportunity to drive users viewing your videos to your other social media platforms and even your website, so use the space wisely. Check out Home Run Inn Pizza’s Youtube Page to see what I’m talking about.
SEO value of Youtube
Youtube is a great way to boost your SEO rankings for your website as well. If you host all of the videos on your website through Youtube it then creates cross-linking that is great for boosting your organic rankings. Also, make sure you are Optimizing your Youtube videos correctly so they can be properly crawled by the search engines, and give you the most bang for your buck as possible.
If Facebook advertising is not yet part of your marketing mix, maybe these stats will help you to reconsider giving it a try. According to comScore, Facebook accounted for over 25% of all display ad impressions in Q4 of 2010, up from 23% in Q3. The average time spent onsite in March for the average Facebook user was over 6 hours! These new figures have come at the expense of all Facebook’s competitors, including Google who had a decline from 2.7% to 2.4%. Yahoo was affected the most, whose display ad share from 11% to 9.4%.
Also reported is the Facebook Like button being the new method of showing online support for local businesses. And contrary to popular belief, deals and discounts are not always the deciding factor for someone “liking” a business. In fact, so single factor really influences that decision. Here are a few other interesting stats.
- Millenials and Women are most likely to hop on Facebook
- 40% of under 35 “like” a business, and 49% are in the 18-24 group, compared to 18% that would write a review
- Only 8% of people say that a deal influences them to try a local business
To learn more, read Media Post’s Like It or Leave It.
If you’re needing some ideas on how to launch a Facebook advertising campaign, or just getting started in Facebook, check out their new Facebook Studio. It showcases campaign successes, best practices, and tools for advertising and getting started. OR you can call us, your local social media experts
Sky King Fireworks, one of the nation’s premier fireworks retailers, has officially rocketed into the fireworks season with a new multi-prong digital marketing campaign. From the launch of a brand new (search engine optimized!) website, to the creation of a social media campaign that includes Facebook and an extremely large video library on YouTube, to an overhaul of their email marketing program, Sky King Fireworks is ready to kick off their summer selling season. The 2011 summer campaign holds a lot of opportunity for their 18 stores across Florida, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, specifically:
- the opportunity for the site to be found on online and map searches to create a competitive edge over nearby stores in their local markets
- the ability to create a “wish list” of products that the visitor can print off and bring into a store, decreasing the likelihood that they stop at a competitor fireworks tent on their way to Sky King
- housing a central database of their organically-acquired email addresses that they can now send segmented and targeted emails to
- videos of their products can now be shared through social networks.
- analytics on their website so they can monitor usability, engagement, and make educated decisions about their site moving forward
EIM created a look and feel with an integrated approach across all their channels that brings the “King” to the forefront, with a whimsical and fun design. Check them out!
