I recently attended this webinar by Grosocial and Yola. Being a web developer marketing is an alien world to me; so what an interesting way to catch up! Here are some points that I noted during the webinar.
It's worth using Facebook to attract customers because it's huge! Currently over 1 billion people are on Facebook.
Why use promotions?
The key to getting customers to your business' Facebook/web site is to use promotions. This gives customers an incentive to visit.
Promotions can help you get likes, email addresses and referrals for your business. "Likes" are subscribers to your Facebook page. Email addresses can be used for marketing outside of Facebook.
Promotions can include:
- Simple sweepstakes
- Photo or video contests
- Like/Fan gates
- Quizzes
Prize selection should take into consideration:
- Can be localised events or experiences (for businesses with a local customer scope)
- An experience they can't normally get, like meeting someone special.
- Should be fun and interesting to your target audience.
- Generous as possible.
- Based on trends such as Christmas, St Valentines Day etc or based around a movie release for example.
For example of what not to do; a tax accountant giving away free tax returns. Boring! It would be much more effective giving away Gold Class movie tickets for the latest movie.
If you are not sure what to give away try asking your existing fans (that's if you have enough).
Setting up your promotion
The only acceptable way is to use tabs built for Facebook. Grosocial include this in their service and this starts from US$ 500. Having users post stuff onto your page is against Facebook's rules and could cause your promotion to be removed.
Duration and Frequency
The ideal duration is 10 to 14 days long. Too short and there won't be enough time for referrals to work. Too long and your promotion will become stale.
Ideally promotions should be run once or twice a month. More people will expect it from you and it will give them a reason to come back to your site/page.
Use increasing incentives
Give customers one entry for liking them, five for providing an email and ten for referring their friends by sharing the promotion page for example.
| Likes: | These are essentially subscriptions to your Facebook page. Yours posts are sent to your subscribers. Recently Facebook have made some changes here. Not all posts will reach all of your Likes. A score is calculated depending on how much interaction between your business and the user behind the Like. If the score is high enough your post is presented to the user. This can be over-ridden by paying a fee to Facebook. |
| Email: | These are essential for off-Facebook marketing. Remember that Facebook posts can be done as often as you like, not so with emails. They should be limited to one or two per week at the most, but ideally only one or two a month. |
| Referrals/Shares: | The best prize of all for you! Referrals can really accelerate your Likes population, and they should be well rewarded. |
Prizes
See the points about prize selection above too.
Some prize ideas:
- Cash (always appeals)
- Gift cards
- Movie tickets
- Concert tickets
- Giveaways of your work (only if it's fun and appealing like jewellery for example)
- Fun local event tickets (if your business has a local outlook)
A few tips
- Use a third party app such as Grosocial to create your Facebook tabs, or try Blogspots' Tutorial.
- Keep it simple.
- Use a clear call to action.
- Only a few steps to enter. It should take less than 30 seconds for the user to complete.
- Image heavy, text light. Use more images than text.
Case Study
Mountain America Credit Union. Using Facebook promotions they increased their Likes to over 65,000.
Note that they also use Youtube effectively as well, publicising the work they do with schools. But that's another topic!
Making your promo go Viral
This is quite hard to achieve, here are some tips to help your promotion go viral:
- Use incentives to encourage people to share, strong incentives!
- Highly attractive/interesting/funny visual content
- Play on emotions, especially kids and pets.
Have a contest for the cutest kid or pet and watch the competition grow. Allow users to vote for the cutest. But watch out for fraud here. Include a disclaimer to exclude those who are caught cheating.
When to do posts or updates to Facebook
For the best exposure for your business post know your audience and when they are likely to be using Facebook. Most business owners are too busy during the day, so if you want to target them do your posts after 8pm or so.
For stay at home mums anytime after school has started should be OK. Students, after school.