Last December, the Votigo blog featured a post that outlined helpful methods for promoting your social promotion across social networks. Now that Facebook is Timeline-optimized, we want to update our strategies for successfully promoting your Votigo-powered promotion and share best practices for customizing your promotional app to draw your audience in. We are often asked by our clients about how to promote Facebook contests and sweepstakes in an effective and methodical way. The answer is complex in that it includes a series of essential steps that you should follow in order to fully engage your audience.

Before You Publish a Promotion

There are essential questions that you should ask before you publish a promotion. Should you publish to multiple access points? Do your custom graphics have an engaging image that has a call-to-action? How do you customize the sharing messages – Facebook and Twitter – when building it?

Publishing to multiple entry points is optional, but wise if you have a mobile audience or want to embed an iframe version of your promotion into a website outside of Facebook (such as your homepage or blog). Utilizing the mobile capability is a must if your audience reviews your mobile site or reads your emails on their mobile devices. By providing multiple entry points for customers, you will remove barriers to entry.

Also, your promotional graphics must have clear calls-to-action to eliminate confusion for people entering your contest or sweeps, especially when it comes to adding a custom like-gate image. It isn’t enough to upload a beautiful graphic if there is no call-to-action to accompany it, such as, “Like our page to enter the promotion,” or “Enter the sweepstakes below.” Your graphics tell a visual story, as well as provide direction to your audience.

Customizing the sharing messages on Facebook and Twitter when you are building your promotion is a very important feature. This is the message that you will be providing your fans to share to their audiences. Make it unique, engaging and simple. They of course may edit it before sharing.

After You Publish a Promotion: Customize your App icon

Now, optimize your Facebook Timeline to draw attention to it.

These steps will allow your audience to easily locate your contest or sweeps on your Timeline – just below your cover photo – and draw them in visually with a unique and attractive image. This is a very important piece of the promotion puzzle that gets overlooked in many cases. But it’s critical in Timeline, where only four Apps show at a time, and all visitors to your Facebook page see your Timeline page first.

To customize the app icon graphic image and rename the app icon:

Go into the Admin Panel
Manage > Edit Page> Apps
Upload a custom icon (111×74px) that includes a visual call-to-action
Rename the App icon: something clear, like “Enter To Win Tickets!”

Position your App Icon

Then make sure your promotion is in the top 4 apps on your timeline. You can adjust this by manually by choosing the dropdown arrow next to the top 4 apps and selecting the pencil icon in the top right corner of the app icon. You can then choose to swap positions with one of the apps in the top 4.

Promote on your Timeline

Write a post about your promotion with a graphic (400×400) and pin it to the top of your Timeline 7 days! You can do so by clicking the “Pencil” icon (upper right) to “Pin” your posting on your Timeline.

Make sure you write a compelling message about the promotion – the theme, the prize, and other details to compel readers to enter.

Tell People About It Beyond Facebook

Now that you have customized your app icon and pinned a posting of it on your Timeline, you are ready to start promoting cross-channel. This is essential to kickstart the viral effect and to draw in the critical early adopters.

Fortunately there are plenty of tools to spread the word. Do these things to activate your social audience:

1) Post messages and updates about it on your Facebook page (and make sure your team “Likes” it too)
2) Tweet about it regularly – some brands do so daily
3) Post about it on your company’s LinkedIn profile page, and on the status updates of your individual employees
4) Write a blog post about it on your corporate blog
5) Send promotion announcement in your email marketing messages, newsletters and even day-to-day emails.

6) Create a video about it and post it on YouTube
7) Set up a display advertising campaign on Facebook
8 ) Tell influential bloggers and Tweeters about it
9) Tell your clients about it directly; word-of-mouth is powerful
10) Post about on Google+ (and make sure to “+1″ it from your own account)
11) Use in-store signage if you have retail locations
12) Broadcast a consistent message about it in your traditional media (radio, TV, print) advertising
13) Put out a press release about it
14) Point PPC ads from AdWords directly to the promotion app
15) Contact industry associations to message their members about it

Also, a few quick essential reminders for promoting any social contest, sweepstakes, competition or other promotion:

Include a link directly to the website, mobile landing page, YouTube channel, Twitter account or Facebook app where the contest or sweepstakes is live. Since Timeline can’t default your Facebook page to land on an app, providing the link anywhere you can is key.
Use simple, clear calls-to-action, such as “Tell your friends about our contest…”
Be responsive to users who reply, comment or re-post your messages

It’s a simple blend of old and new tactics for spreading the word, but you might be surprised by how many brands fail to lay the groundwork of their promotion from the beginning. And you can always contact us for help.

If you enlist the right combination of the tactics above for your audience, you can expect the viral effect to kick in and generate awareness and participation. You’ll increase your “Likes” and expand your social media audience, get permission to email a whole new list of potential customers, and inspire great content that you can use for future marketing efforts.

What strategies have been most effective in promoting your latest campaigns? Tweet us @Votigo or post about it on our Facebook wall.

Yesterday Facebook announced the Preferred Marketing Developer (PMD) program, merging the Preferred Developer Consultant (PDC) and Marketing API programs. PMD is a huge indicator of the commitment Facebook is making to developers and platforms like Votigo. And it’s an important signal to brands and businesses about the most important components of marketing on Facebook.

Facebook has fostered an ecosystem of developers almost as long as it has allowed brands to create Pages. We’re thrilled to see the evolution of the ecosystem. It’s the latest in a series of momentous changes this year that renew Facebook as the hub of social marketing. And it shows that Facebook is doubling down on the model of companies like Votigo partnering with businesses and brands like yours to innovate, introduce new technology, and help you reach your marketing goals within the Facebook brand experience.

We are truly cross-platform, the leading technology provider of marketing and promotions on YouTube, Twitter, Instagram, mobile and all other social channels. Yet we are as committed as ever to growing and innovating with our customers on Facebook. There is still so much opportunity, and our customers are investing in social marketing as a strategic, always-on software service that bolsters their entire marketing plan.

Votigo powered our first promotion on Facebook in August, 2008. We became one of the early PDCs in March, 2010. Apps, and especially promotions apps like UGC contests and sweepstakes, have always been our focus, and the centerpiece of marketing activity on Facebook. To this day, nothing beats a photo contest for inspiring user-generated content and viral sharing among followers. Their impact has only expanded since the Timeline layout rolled out last month (Timeline makes apps more visually engaging, inside and out.)

We are proud to sport the PMD badge for Apps. We’re excited to keep collaborating with world-class brands and agencies, and small business and start-ups alike, on Apps and beyond. Contact us to learn about our full-service capabilities or create a Votigo account to begin building promotions and marketing apps on your own.

The tools for engaging your audience on Facebook have never brought you closer to the consumer than they do now. Let’s get started.

Ready or not, your company’s Facebook page transitioned to the Timeline layout a week ago. (For more information about this change, which Facebook announced in February and finalized on March 30, please check out our last several posts.) Yet the change is new enough that we’ve noticed plenty of brands and businesses haven’t taken all the steps to optimize their Timeline, or draw their Facebook audience to it.

If you haven’t really made the transition yet, your Timeline may have a blank space at the top, and crickets chirping in the background. Here are four things you can do immediately:

1) Make it Visual

Above all, Facebook made the change to Timeline to create “a big, fat, storytelling canvas” for your business (their words, not ours.) Fittingly, the most noticeable changes are opportunities to tell the visual story of your brand. The centerpiece: an expansive (851×315 px) new Cover Photo atop your page. Brands from Verizon to the local candy shop are using this valuable real estate to showcase user-generated content, take visitors inside a store, highlight employees and team members, introduce new products, or convey an aspirational moment (like luxury travel). You can’t use a call-to-action in this space- but you can do nearly anything else to introduce your brand. If you haven’t uploaded an image, this space is blank. Choose a picture and do it.

And don’t stop there. Other opportunities to make your Timeline more visual are to

• Post a large Profile Picture (180×180 px) and Custom Apps/Tabs Icons (111×74 px) right below the cover photo
• Pin large photos and posts to the top of your Timeline where they will remain for 7 days
• Create Milestones that tell a chronological narrative of your company
• Highlight posts, giving them twice the width on your Timeline – a great way to showcase Milestones

For more details on each of these new features, check out Facebook’s Pages Product Guide.

2) Engage them directly

In addition to being a visual canvas, Timeline is also supposed to serve as “Mission Control for your business” (quoting Facebook again). The fundamental activity for brands on Facebook has always been dialogue directly with your fans and customers. Timeline makes this even easier by making the brand experience on Facebook more similar to the person-to-person experience.

Take advantage of the reset opportunity that Timeline offers by doubling down on dialogue with your fans. The new Message feature is one of the best Mission Control features available. Encourage users to message you directly (in the upper right corner of Timeline.) Then log-in to your admin panel- complete with improve metrics and Insights, and answer those direct messages. Get feedback, provide service, and cultivate long-term customers. Mission control!

3) Engage them, Part II

With the initial setup and dialogue work in progress on your Facebook Timeline, the fun begins. The biggest challenge for brands on Facebook is how to engage your fans so that they visit your page, or at least read your posts when they become visible on their Newsfeeds.

Promotions and other apps are effective ways to engage your audience, and get them to not only revisit you on Facebook but also spread the word. Run a sweepstakes to draw more fans to your page and generate some buzz. Or run a viral photo or video contest to inspire user generated content and word-of-mouth, in the form of users directing friends to your Facebook page to vote for their entry.

Both are tremendous ways to introduce a new product, promote an event, reinforce your brand, or simply check-in with your audience.

4) Plug it back in

How do you convert fans on Facebook- or followers on any social channel- into happy, long-term customers? (That is ultimately the goal with most marketing efforts!) By plugging it back into your greater marketing strategy. Social conversations and promotions are no different. Here are some basics to remember:

Go across channel: Make sure to optimize all marketing – including social – for your audience, and for emerging formats. Twitter is fantastic for short-form, frequent check-ins. LinkedIn lends itself to a B2B and service-oriented audience. Pinterest is for all things visual Social marketing should be branded consistently to your email marketing, digital (display) advertising, and even traditional campaigns (TV, print and trade shows).

Use the content: if you collect glowing reviews of your company or products when talking to users, or photos or videos from a contest app, use them! On your website, in your adds, in brochures, in future emails. Customer-generated content is the most powerful form of referral.

Expand your marketing database: Anytime you collect email addresses- by interacting with an individual or running a sweepstakes, for example- don’t forget to add them to your email marketing database (assuming the users have “opted-in,” of course). Email marketing is a powerful compliment to social, and vice versa, so don’t forget this important step.

5) Activate

Promotions are about activating long-term customers from within your audience. So whatever your goals may be, whatever channels and themes and promotions you decide on, make sure you provide an opportunity for people to become customers. Whether that means offering all sweepstakes entrants a coupon or discount code, mailing gift cards to contest finalists, giving free trials or new products away to power users, or driving store traffic to retail locations or ecommerce pages, make sure that you offer an activation step.

Timeline is here. Take advantage of the new layout and the opportunities it offers. And like all marketing efforts, follow through to make the most of your Facebook strategy.

Facebook finalizes the transition to Timeline for brands one week from today (March 30), presenting a timely opportunity to make your Facebook page the visual, storytelling hub of your brand. Many brands have already crossed over to the Facebook Timeline. Favorites to date are using the new page layout to deliver a specific and targeted brand message. Some use aspirational imagery to take Facebook users somewhere special (Starwood Preferred Guest, Pier 39, Kurumba Maldives). Some are mission-driven (TOMS Shoes, American Heart Association). Some use the larger tab/app icons to drive viewers to other social channels like YouTube (Sphero). Some illustrate their brand with adorable baby photography (Kristin Richardson Photography). Some celebrate a milestone (AutoCAD). And some expertly showcase user-generated content (Verizon Wireless).

What they are all doing is taking advantage of the greatly-expanded visual space- the new Cover image is 851px wide- for visual storytelling that simply wasn’t possible with the old Facebook page layout. And most of them take advantage of the larger Custom App Icon to draw attention to the four apps posted just below the Cover image. (You can integrate more than four apps on your Page and you can reorder which ones appear in the top row of 4).

For those of you currently running Votigo-powered apps, your promotions and tabs will transition seamlessly to the expanded app page layout (now much wider at 810px). You’ll have the opportunity to optimize your live promotions for the new Timeline layout by adding a larger image. Or you can choose to let them continue as you originally designed them- they will function seamlessly at their original size, even within the wider layout. Just make sure to log-in and optimize the order of your apps and, if possible, add Custom App Icons to draw attention to all of your apps, including Votigo-powered promotions.

And all promotions created starting March 30 will automatically be optimized for 810px- so have your new images ready to go. We will also introduce new design templates and an expanded preview so that you can experience your apps more completely before publishing them.

For a complete recap and details of Votigo’s transition to Facebook Timeline, check out this post in Votigo’s resource center.

We can’t say it enough: Timeline is a tremendous opportunity to step up your Facebook Page to tell the story of your brand and engage with users at a higher level, since they will experience your brand on Facebook just as they experience an individual friend. Get your page ready to go for March 30- and let us know if we can help.

Today was Facebook Marketing Conference in New York. An incredible collection of marketers from brands, agencies, developers and platforms filled the American Museum of Natural History to share inspiring stories of success on Facebook, and hear the latest updates- a stirring set of new offerings and features that they hope will make “Marketing on Facebook feel like the right of Facebook,” in the words of Mike Hoefflinger, Facebook Director of Global Business Marketing. (He also called Timeline a “big fat storytelling canvas” and showed some tremendous examples, from Starbucks and Walmart to Red Bull and Kia.)

It was awesome. It was inspiring. It was a tremendous reminder that Facebook continues to serve as the most comprehensive social destination for brand and audience interaction- and that Timeline is the new “Mission Control for your Company.”

But what does it mean for you?

Above all, it means that Branding and Promotions are alive and well on Facebook. There are new features to adapt to, and new offerings to help you reach more people. But the fundamentals- Facebook as a channel for engaging directly with your customers, giving them offers, gathering their impressions of your brand through user-generated content- haven’t changed.

Please join us for Votigo’s Facebook Marketing Update Webinar, Monday, March 5, at 1pm EST. Sign-up here.

Summary:You can still engage your audience on Facebook by creating and running promotions. All Votigo-powered promotions will work as you designed them. New features make it even easier to direct your audience to promotions and apps. And Like-Gating is still an effective, available feature for engaging audiences who visit your timeline page.

What Changed: Facebook announced that in 30 days, all brand Pages will be transitioned to the new Timeline, or as Facebook calls it, “Mission Control for your Business.” You can begin setting up your Timeline immediately.

What It Means: As Preferred Developers, Votigo has anticipated this change and taken all efforts to ensure that our Platform, and all live and created promotions, will perform as you designed them. We’ll continue to track new Facebook Timeline developments to ensure that your campaigns are seamless. More importantly, your Timeline will strengthen your connection to your audience.

What Changed: Facebook is focused on Storytelling (as opposed to Advertising); in fact, they call Timeline “a big, fat, storytelling canvas.” The new Timeline view emphasizes your brand’s visual imagery (a Cover Photo of product and customers), milestones in your company’s history, and direct engagement with your followers (through the new Message feature.)

What It Means: Promotions and other apps definitelycontinue to be a big part of Faecbook brand marketing; in fact, they may be more important than ever for engaging your audience, drawing them to your new Timeline page, and creating a long-term relationship.

What Changed: There is no longer a default landing tab setting for users to hit a specific tab or app on your Page; they will visit your Timeline first. The tabs are now more visual, with photo icons, just below the Cover Photo.

What It Means:Two new, important features make it simple to direct visitors to your tabs. First, you can highlight posts on your Timeline. (Hover over the upper right corner of a published post and click on the star icon to “Highlight” a post.) And you can upload a Custom Tab Image. (Click “Admin Panel” on Timeline; click on the arrow next to the tabs below the Cover Photo; Hover over the pencil for any Apps you want to change, and click “Edit Settings.”)

So launch a promotion. Write a post about your Promotion, and give it a unique image to draw visitors to it. Many examples and case studies at fMC showcased user-generated photos and videos, and the biggest takeaway might be that, while some features have changed, the opportunity to engage your audience on Facebook has not.

Please Contact our Client Services team to talk about Full-Service promotions. Visit support.votigo.com for additional questions. Or log-in now to start building your next promotion.

Neiman Marcus launched a sweepstakes to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Christian Louboutin shoes, leveraging the viral, visual combo of Twitter and Instagram to create a first-of-its-kind viral promotion that is a case study in using fan-favorite social platforms to engage an audience. The Votigo-powered cross-platform promotion collects user-generated photos through March 10 and displays them on the Neiman Marcus blog and Facebook page.

Three important takeaways if you plan to run a visually-charged Twitter sweepstakes:

It is important to know your audience. Make sure your followers have a passion for photography (often using their mobile camera) and a willingness to share their art via Twitter. Instagram has a natural alignment with consumer brands – from retailers to luxury goods to labels. (Wrote@nickwestergaard in January, “Fashion and beauty brands with obvious visual appeal have planted flags here as well, such as Burberry and Aveda.”)

Accommodate all users. While Instagram carries a certain prestige among photo sharing apps among iPhone-carrying Twitter users, others- especially Yfrog, TwitPic and Twitter’s own pic.Twitter- also each capture a huge share of Twitter photo posts. So a photo-driven Twitter sweeps must accommodate each of these- as Neiman Marcus’ does.

A Unique Call To Action. In order capture and qualify the virally-driven flood of entries that a well-designed promotion (with a perfectly fitting prize) should deliver, make sure to require unique attributes in the original tweet. The Neiman Marcus sweeps requires the entrant to use both brands’ Twitter handles (@NeimanMarcus and @LouboutinWorld) as well as the unique hashtag #NMLoubiLove – which also makes it easy to check out all the action on Twitter.

Contact the Votigo team to find out more about running a photo-driven Twitter sweepstakes.

For additional reading check out AllFacebook and Luxury Daily

We get excited when we get a chance to ahead forward with our full-service clients and strategize on the trends and tools that that will shape the coming year. Recently we gave some general ideas on how to create a social media marketing plan for 2012. Today we’ll build on that and share some of the insight and best practices we’ve been developing with our premium clients.

As always, to go deeper on how each of these concepts can be integrated into your plans for next year, simply contact us. Without further ado, here are three important trends to bank on in 2012:

Go Mobile: Mobile continues to be adopted heavily as a research and purchasing tool by savvy consumers, accounting for 14% of all Black Friday traffic by some reports. Marketers should view it as a core tenet of 2012 planning. Stay ahead of the curve in 2012 and interact with your on-the-go audience in fun and unique ways. Utilize check-ins, instant offers or coupons to engage your audience in real-time. Think about using QR codes, which are underused and often misunderstood; when used properly they can help drive consumer behavior and can be a great compliment to a promotion such as a sweepstakes. Go beyond the web and reach customers in person or through print ads that utilize QR codes to drive consumers to your website, social channels, or a dedicated microsite.

Go Cross-Platform: Cross-channel promotions are becoming more essential than ever, as Google+ and other platforms continue to grow in popularity and cater to different user types and behaviors. The most social brands on the web are already experimenting with Google+ to find ways to authentically interact with their audience on this emerging platform. Google already announced that promotions cannot be hosted on the social network, surprising many brands that look to promotions to grow their audiences and interact with their fans. Instead, brands can use dedicated microsites, promoted and linked from their Google+ pages like they already do with Twitter sweepstakes, as the hub of a promotion geared toward their Google+ audiences. Microsites are the perfect way to allow engagement for users from their preferred networks, while controlling the visual branding, sharing tools and features.

Get In the Cloud: You know about the cloud, but you thought it was just for storage, security or distributed processing? It’s time to take your marketing into the cloud, too. Proactive brand marketers, already investing resources to engage audiences across social channels, think of their marketing as an always-on service targeted across a vast network of consumers, rather than a series of one-off campaigns and promotions. They use technology partners to deliver on-demand marketing utilities, ranging from promotions to branded apps to powerful back-end management and metrics dashboard.

You can start integrating the cloud by licensing a Software-as-a-Service tool (such as the Votigo Platform for creating audience engaging apps across all social platforms) or by tapping into a powerful API which your own developers can use to build out the social marketing apps that your need to take your audience to the next level.

Mobile…cross-platform…cloud. Three technology trends in a grander context, and three critical components of your 2012 plan. Check back here often, sign up to hear from us, or follow us on Twitter for frequent updates, offers, and examples of great executions.