Oh. Yes. We. DID.
We came up with a whole list of tips you can use to pump up your Facebook, Twitter and other social media pages like YouTube or Flickr. Implementing these ideas at the right time, right place and right market will help you get more fans and more interactions (perhaps you are marketing to women?). If this list were a candy store, it’d be called Engage – come on in, feast your eyes on the delectable treats to the right and pick & choose what suits your fancy. Samples provided (like BlogPerfume’s 27 free social media icons here)!
The mantra to remember as you ponder and peruse is quality over quantity. Especially for Facebook, avoid posting more than one quality post per day. Once you make a fan feel like they are getting “spam” from your page, they will “Unlike” your page and never come back. It is okay to post more than once per day for Twitter, but again, keep it to high quality tweets. Listening = cornerstone of using social media effectively.
Promoting Your Facebook Page
Contests
Give incentive for people to become fans by rewarding Facebook interactions with a chance to win gift cards, coupons/discounts and other free products and services. A good place to go for a random draw for comment or photo entries is http://www.random.org.
Note: You should encourage people to participate in contests externally i.e. on your website, flyers, newsletter. Also, as you probably have read in our blog post about Facebook Promotion Guidelines, it’s good to read up on the rules and logistics that apply locally, provincially or nationally.
• Draw for a $100 gift card if you become a fan of Facebook page and comment on the wall (saying what you will put the $100 towards for the company’s products or services)
• Free product or service if fans upload an image of their front windows (decorated for Halloween or Christmas) and tag the most friends who become fans
• Append a ***LIVE CONTEST*** header in front of contest status update to emphasize the relevance to each person so they join the contest and try to win (e.g. Promotional Products on Facebook)
If you’re looking for more contest ideas specific to your company’s needs, or perhaps something of a much larger scale for bigger impact (like successful Future Shop campaigns “Playoff Pad” (case study) and “Hunt. Gather. Win!” (case study) that we’ve done), give us a quick email or call. We love coming up with innovative online contests and we’d love to learn more about your goals and give you some ideas.
“Like” Boosters
• Put “SMS-to-Like a Fan Page” information on print materials
• Add Facebook “Like” button on the top right hand corner of company website (e.g. October 17 Media)
Promoting Your Twitter Page
• Encourage blog readers to follow you on Twitter…if you’re liking this post and finding it helpful, follow us!
• Use common hashtags to join in on a conversation relevant to your industry and to find related tweets
• Use link shorteners like j.mp (the new bit.ly) that have analytics available so you can monitor which tweets are most effective at getting people to click and read your links
Promoting Any and All Social Media
• Intertwine all your networks e.g. by adding Twitter and YouTube tabs on your Facebook page
(see Involver for free applications)
• Signatures: put social media vanity URLs along with your contact information on the bottom of your emails, blog posts, and custom Facebook tabs (e.g. look at the bottom of our Facebook notes and blog posts)
Whew. That was a lot, but for real, there’s a lot more where those came from. We hope you can implement at least a handful of these tips and please let us know how they worked for you! As always, we would love to receive comments from you and if you have any questions, this is where you can find us!
Written by:
Priscilla Ho {Profile}: Online Marketing Wizard @ October 17 Media
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Tags: Blogging, Boost Online Traffic, custom, Facebook, Future Shop, Landing Pages, Promotional Ideas, quality, Self Promotion, Social Media, tabs, Twitter, Viral Marketing
Great tools, tactics and advice! I totally agree with quality over quantity, and “Listening = cornerstone of using social media effectively.”