In our last Social Media Marketing Explained blog post we discussed some of the basic guidelines for successful Social Media Marketing Strategies. In part two we aim to go into Social Media Engagement Strategies in more detail covering sweepstakes and promotions.
Social Media Sweepstakes
Sweepstakes and promotions are a great way to keep fans and followers excited, more importantly a great way to get your current fans and followers sharing your content with their followers. Running these promotions keep your fans popping back to see if they’ve won, and long term holds onto them as a follower as they don’t want to miss any future promotions.
Social Media Engagement Strategies for Sweepstakes and Promotions
By choosing to have a promotion running all the time, this takes away the buzz of a promotion and it will soon become more social background noise. The key is to hold a new promotion every few months, and make sure it’s a half decent prize or people will have no interest in your promotion whatsoever. The main aims and objectives of a sweepstake is to build up your fans / followers on Facebook and Twitter. One of the huge benefits to a promotion is you are able to build a network of followers who (if done correctly) should be interested in your product or service; you guarantee this by the prize give away. For example, if Unit36 was to run a promotion our prize might be 3 months free social media management, now if this was the prize we would potentially only get followers who are interested in winning this service for their business, therefore gaining a follower that is also a potential client. When creating strategies to gain followers to a business Facebook page or company Twitter account too many businesses concentrate on the numbers. You’ve heard the saying ‘quality over quantity’, this likewise applies to Social Media Marketing, there’s no point having 2,000 female followers aged 20-25 if your company sells hair loss products, it doesn’t gain you anything apart from followers who will most probably never purchase your product.
Marketing Your Social Media Promotions
The obvious ways of marketing your promotion for free is to include a link from the homepage on your website, and updates through Facebook and Twitter. However if you’re looking to increase your following by large numbers over a short period of time, then you will need to use a source of paid advertising like Facebook Ads.
Facebook Ads
Facebook Ads is a great way to market your promotion, some companies still choose to advertise using Google PPC but this can be expensive and Facebook Ads are far more flexible than Google Adwords, not to mention far more cost effective. The best part about Facebook Ads is you can market to your exact target audience including, sex, age, interests, location.
