December 2, 2011 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown
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Giving away a prize sounds like a quick and easy way to attract new people to your social media sites, and an even better way to keep the attention of the fans you already have. Right?
Sort of.
Social media promotions are a good idea some of the time, but there are five main things you need to consider before launching a giveaway (or sweepstakes, or contest) of your own:
This should sound pretty obvious, but don’t have a contest or giveaway just to have one. You need to have a goal. Are you trying to develop brand loyalty among your fans and followers, or are you trying to catch the attention of people outside your current audience? What would you like to happen after the promotion is over? If you can’t answer these basic questions, you need to sit down and really think about it before you go any further. Be concrete and realistic, and set numerical goals where possible.
These words technically, and legally, have different definitions. A sweepstakes traditionally involves the entrant filling out a form to enter, and the winner(s) are picked at random. Contests require more effort and are usually judged based on skill or voted on by the public. Examples include essay, photo, and video contests. It’s pretty safe to assume that fewer people will enter a contest than a sweepstakes since it is slightly more difficult and requires more effort on the part of the participant to enter. However, those who do enter will be more highly engaged with your brand.
Did you know that the rules governing your contest or giveaway depend entirely on which U.S. state you or your entrants are in? Did you even know there were laws for that? Surprise! There are. Social media platforms have their guidelines, too. Our CEO Shama wrote a more detailed post on Facebook’s rules when they were altered back in 2009, but Twitter and Google+ have their own sets of completely different regulations for contests.
Most people like free stuff, but it’s good to offer your audience something they actually want and will use. Another important factor to consider, if you’re holding a contest rather than a sweepstakes (if you already forget the difference, refer back to #2), is the difficulty of entry for your participants. Are the majority of your social media fans tech gods and goddesses? Yes? Then a video contest is an excellent idea and a great way to engage this group by letting them show off their skills. However, if you doubt the video-editing prowess of your target audience, something slightly less labor-intensive may be the way to go.
What if your contest goes viral and you start getting thousands of entries? Are you prepared to handle that? That’s a really unlikely and extreme example, although it could still happen, but let’s take something that could realistically happen: cheating. If you rely on public voting, you’re opening your contest up for potential cheating. What are you going to do about that? In a very recent example of contests gone horribly wrong, Australian airline Qantas held a Twitter contest with the hashtag #qantasluxury and received a vast majority of negative and joke responses ridiculing their service (and the fact that the prize was a pair of pajamas). There’s no way you can plan for everything, but at least take it into consideration: What are the aspects of this contest or sweepstakes that could potentially backfire?
Have you held a social media sweepstakes or contest before? How did it go? Would you do it again? Let us know your thoughts in the comments!
Photo credit: source
November 29, 2011 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown
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Klout measures your online influence on a scale from 1 to 100. The average Klout score hovers somewhere around 20. Justin Bieber has a perfect Klout score of 100. Klout itself has a Klout score in the 80s, meaning the site is apparently less influential than a 17-year-old pop star (but then again, I guess we’re all at least slightly less influential than The Bieber).
Well. You can link various social sites to Klout, but it only measures your activity and friends/followers on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, and Foursquare. Additionally, Klout measures:
1. True reach: The number of people you influence, which is different from your number of followers. Klout claims to filter out spam and only focus on those people who interact with and respond to your posts.
2. Amplification: How many people are sharing your content and how often they’re doing it.
3. Network Impact: A measure of people in your True Reach with a high Amplification (i.e. how important your friends are).
One potentially useful aspect of Klout is the list of topics that you appear to be influential about. For example, Marketing Zen employees are overwhelmingly influential about social media, Facebook, marketing, and other related areas.
Sometimes the influential topics have slightly more mysterious origins.
The good news is that Klout makes it easier to find the most influential people on a given topic or in your industry, and other Klout users can give +Ks to people who influence them on topics – hopefully making the system more accurate at some point in the future. The bad news is that the most influential person for “snorkeling” might not actually tweet about the topic on a regular basis.
If you’re a business using social media marketing, take Klout’s metrics with a grain of salt. As tech blogger Aliza Sherman put it in a recent post, “Klout isn’t any more measuring your success using social media or your influence over others any more than Foursquare is making you the actual mayor of anything.” Are people clicking on the links you’re posting? Klout has no idea. Your social media marketing strategy should be to push traffic back to your website first, and then to build relationships with people. Getting the most influential people on the internet to follow your social media accounts isn’t really that high on the list of priorities, and might not do that much for you in the long run.
Paying attention to the rise and fall of your Klout score probably won’t do you any harm, but we don’t feel that there’s any real proof that it’ll help you. Our suggestion? If you choose to pay attention to Klout, pay more attention to influential topics and don’t put too much stock in your numerical Klout score.
What do you think? Does the rise and fall of your Klout score determine your every move? Are you just hearing about Klout for the first time? If you don’t use Klout, how are you measuring the impact of your social media program? Let us know, we love hearing from you!
November 21, 2011 - Posted by Amy Rose Brown
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The holiday season is all about friends and family connecting and reconnecting with one another. As a brand on social media, you want – even need – to be a part of people’s holiday traditions and memories. We’ve compiled some tips to help effectively transition your company’s year-round message to one of good tidings, sugarplums, mistletoe, and…you get the picture.
Photo contests are easy for participants and allow for more interaction with your brand than simply liking your Facebook page or filling out a form for entry. A fun, creative example of a holiday photo contest is last year’s 12 Days of LUV Twitter campaign launched by Southwest Airlines. Each of the 12 days had a different photo challenge, and the best photo of the day won the entrant a $1000 gift card. Other ideas: ugliest holiday sweater, best gingerbread house, pet with the most holiday spirit, or best/worst gift received.
If you’re a business with a storefront, set up a canned food or Toys for Tots drop-off site and promote it on your social media accounts. You can also pledge to donate a certain amount of money for every new Facebook fan you get during a certain time period: the 12 days leading up to Christmas, or even the whole month of December. It’ll help get you on the radar of new customers/fans, and you’ll be helping those who really need the most holiday cheer.
This one is probably the easiest tip, not counting the graphic design work involved. Think of holiday imagery and incorporate it into your existing Twitter background, Facebook photo, blog header, etc. Some suggestions include: a Santa hat or antlers on your logo, snowflakes, candy canes, snowmen, gingerbread men, strings of lights – the list really goes on and on.
What kind of tips? That depends on your target audience. If you’re targeting mostly males over 30, you could offer tips on how to shop for tweens and teenagers. If your target audience is made up of college students, you could compile tips on the theme of “Gift-Giving on a Budget.” Other types of tips include: traveling, entertaining, sticking to a diet, and pet safety. Whatever your industry, there’s a list of holiday tips just waiting to be unleashed.
Have you seen the Target commercials with the intense lady in the red jumpsuit? That’s the Christmas Champ, and she’s on Twitter this year. The Christmas Champ is a prime example of having fun with a holiday social media campaign. Twitter users constantly mention the account and that they “love” her (and she consistently tweets that she loves them back, or in one case, “I love you so much I’m afraid I’ll never be able to love again”). Fun is contagious: if you’re having fun, the people around you can’t help but have fun too. Unless the only two people around you are Scrooge and the Grinch, then disregard all previous advice.
Does your company have a social media marketing strategy for the holidays? Leave us a comment with your tips and tricks!
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