New Apps: Instant Win Sweepstakes, Instagram Sweepstakes & Coupons

Our dev  team deserves some rest! They have been ridiculously busy creating some amazing new promotion apps to allow you to better acquire and engage your customers across social channels. We’re thrilled to announce the addition of three new promotion applications to the Votigo Platform:  Instant Win Sweepstakes, Instagram Sweepstakes and a Coupons! All three applications are available today at https://platform.votigo.com/create

Instant Win Sweepstakes
Opposed to a Standard Sweepstakes where 1 or more winners are selected at random at the end of a promotion our Instant Win Sweepstakes allows you to award prizes instantly throughout the campaign. You can set multiple prizes and determine the frequency with which each prizes is awarded. The benefit for entrants is immediate gratification, which can lead to more sharing and a bigger viral boost for your promotion.  The benefit to you is that Votigo does all the work. Our technology handles selecting and notifying winners on the fly, distributing winner notifications and prize information and providing easy-to-digest analytics.

Instant Win Sweepstakes are a great alternative to a Standard Sweepstakes and work best when awarding a lot of prizes. For example, you could giveaway 5 t-shirts a day for a month as instant win prizes and have one grand prize drawing for concert tickets at the end of the campaign.

Create an Instant Win Sweepstakes

Instagram Photo or Video Sweepstakes
No one can argue with the success of Instagram. With 130 million Monthly Active Users and 45 million  Photos shared daily it’s clearly resonated with consumers and created a phenomenal channel for sharing and engaging with your customers. This is why we’ve expanded the Votigo Platform to include an Instagram Sweepstakes. An Instagram Sweepstakes may be THE best way to grow your follows and virally spread your brand message on Instagram. Here’s how it works:

You set the requirements for the Instagram photo or video (yes, Instagram supports video now) sweepstakes, the #hashtag users need to include in their entry. Votigo handles making sure each entrant follows your brand and consolidates all valid entries into a great looking gallery for you to host on your Facebook page or website. You even have the option to moderate your entries to avoid having any unsavory images appear on your promotion landing page.

Create an Instagram Sweepstakes

Coupons
This is the app we’re most excited about. Our Coupon app is a super simple way to give your customers an offer that can directly impact sales. The app allows you to create three types of coupons: 1) Single Coupon Code – These are great for online coupons. For example, “Enter “SantaRules” at checkout to receive 20% off your purchase.” 2) Unique Coupon Codes – These allow you to distribute a unique coupon code to every user. This is great for limiting redemption and better tracking specific usage. 3) Offer Only – These don’t require a coupon code and allow for the widest distribution. An example is “By one Bagel, Get one FREE.”

Create a Coupon 

Like all our apps Instant Win Sweepstakes, Instagram Sweepstakes and Coupons are easy to set-up, customize, distribute and track and all of them work great on mobile and can be published to Facebook or a microsite.

Let us know what you think or if you have ideas for new apps or features.

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Facebook Sends a Message on the Importance of Promotions

Yesterday Facebook announced that it has removed some restrictions about how businesses can run promotions (Contests and Sweepstakes) on Facebook.  Previously, the Facebook Promotion Guidelines prohibited any promotion from using any native Facebook functionality like “posting on the Brand Page wall”, “commenting on posts”, “liking posts”, etc.  And they required that businesses use a third party application provider like Votigo.

With the change promotions can now be administered on Page Timelines. For example, entries may be collected by posting to a page or commenting or liking a Page post.

By making these changes Facebook is affirming what we’ve always known. Promotions are an extremely important component of marketing for businesses of all sizes.  Promotions offer a business the best way to acquire and engage new and existing customers.  Facebook also recognized that a lot of small brands were ignoring their earlier guidelines anyway and hosting quick and dirty promotions on their Page Timelines anyway.  Instead of having all of these pages be in violation of the earlier policy, which must have created an administrative nightmare for Facebook, they’ve acquiesced.   However, businesses should still be aware of legal regulations from state to state and country to country.

We believe Facebook’s change to their policy will be good for those previously violating the Facebook Promotion Guidelines. They can sleep better at night, but the change will not replace promotion applications and the benefits they deliver.  

What a Facebook Promotion Application can provide that running a promotion on your Page Timeline can’t:

– Like-gate (users must Like your page before they can enter)

– Branded solution

– Collection of custom user data and email address

– Easier to select and contact winners

– Email newsletter opt-in

– Multiple contest and sweepstakes formats:  Photo contests, Video contests, Referral / Viral sweepstakes, Trivia sweepstakes and more.

– Exportable user data and voter reports

– Moderation and pre-screening entries

– Campaign Analytics

Let us know what you think about the new policy and/or if you have any questions about it.

We’re here to help!

– Team Votigo

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