A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words…or Likes

Posted on August 8, 2012 by Hannah

Generating quality content is a hot topic in the social media space for brands and agencies alike. They are constantly evolving their social media marketing strategy to better engage their current audience and attract new fans on Facebook. In an era where content is king, it’s hard to determine which specific type of content will receive the most engagement. This may be the reason why we see such a vast variety of content posts; brands are testing to see which type receives the most “likes,” comments and shares. What is your opinion?

While Facebook users are receptive to different types of content, various studies have shown that the primary media commanding the most attention and interaction is photos. A picture is of one of the simplest and most effective ways a brand can capture attention because it is more visually appealing than a status update or link post. Think about it this way, when you scroll through your newsfeed what usually captures your attention and makes you pause for reaction? PHOTOS. It allows for a more immediate emotional reaction from users on Facebook thus urging them to engage by commenting, liking or sharing your post.

Now that brands are aware of this fact, they can and should use this to their advantage! Here are some great ideas to kick start your efforts:

Try posting a unique photo with a question attached. This will drive dialogue with your fans and encourage them to interact and share with their friends! Behind the scenes photos are also great – they give fans a view into the personal side of your business. Aspirational photos and product photos are also great options for driving engagement. Try out different types of photos and see what your audience responds to.

If you’re looking to increase engagement even further, consider running a Facebook photo contest. A photo contest is a great way to not only interact with your fans directly, but to also increase your fan base, acquire data and receive great images for use in future marketing efforts. A unique theme and/or great prize will ensure entries and drive engagement! Learn more about how to run a Facebook contest.

So, if you are wondering how to increase engagement on your Facebook page, trying using photos! Product photos, aspirational photos and behind the scenes photos are all popular choices. To really engage fans and grow your social presence, run a photo contest – your fans will love to browse entries and they will have an incentive to share their photos as well.

Event Driven Promotions

Posted on July 30, 2012 by Danielle

Creating a social media promotion around an event is a great way to increase the awareness of your event and to help generate buzz. Event driven promotions draw people to the event and can act as an extension of the event itself by helping it spread through social media channels and increasing brand visibility. One of the great things about events is that they take the brand to the people and generate excitement and interest. By creating a social media promotion alongside your event you can extend the life of your event and tie it into your social media efforts.

Events only happen once and therefor are immediate and interesting, make sure to make the most of the event within its limited time of relevance.
Promoting your event on social media with the use of a Facebook contest or sweepstakes creates awareness and buzz for your event, allowing the guest list to grow.
By creating a promotion around an event, you are engaging with customers and fans virtually and not just at the event, allowing you to reach an even larger audience.

A great example of an event driven promotion is the JBL Your Country contest from Isobar North America, JBL, and Tim McGraw. Votigo created a sweepstakes app that allowed users to upload photos and videos for a chance to win a VIP concert experience with country singer Tim McGraw or free Tim McGraw Artist Series headphones. This event driven promotion does a great job building awareness for Tim McGraw’s Artist Series headphones from JBL and also promotes his “Brothers of the Sun” summer concert series. The promotion is a fun and easy way to create awareness and to build your fan base.

By creating a promotion that goes hand in hand with your event you are empowering your customers to engage with your event on social media and to share the event information as far as their circles of influence reach. The event driven promotion is a fun way to advertise your event while simultaneously creating a way for your customers to interact with your brand. If you are interested in creating a promotion visit our website to get the details or contact us today.

Like-Gating: Tips for a Great Design

Posted on July 20, 2012 by Hannah

When running a Facebook contest or sweepstakes, one important consideration for brands and agencies to keep in mind is whether or not to have a Like-Gate. Like-Gating, also referred to as Fan-Gating or Like-Wall, is a low barrier to entry requiring that a user first “Like” a brand’s Facebook page before they can access certain content on that page. This is a feature that will simultaneously increase your fan base and get your social marketing messages onto fans’ newsfeeds! There are several types and styles of like-gates that brands can use. It is an optional feature that may seem like a no-brainer for most brands, but it simply depends on what the brand’s overall goals are.

Once you’ve decided like-gating is for you, you need to start thinking about the design of the like-gate. Something to keep in mind is while simple in concept and beneficial to fan growth; a poor like-gate graphic can seriously confuse and hinder fans from entering your promotion. Not to worry! Votigo is here to provide tips and best practices for customers who value like-gating and would like more information on the process and role that it plays.

A quality Like-Gate graphic image should contain the following:

A dynamic/unique/inspiring custom image that captures your brands personality and the theme of the campaign.
A call-to-action! This is a very important because you want to clearly define what the user has to do in order to enter the promotion. If you simply have a beautiful graphic image with no instruction such as, “Like us to enter this promotion!” then the entrant will be confused and possibly not enter all together. So, make sure to include instructional text on your custom image.
Take advantage of the Timeline Optimization and design your Like-Gate custom image to be the full 810px. Votigo’s platform allows for the max file size of 5MB and supported formats include: jpg, jpeg, gif. The platform allows you to preview the image before it is published. It is important to keep in mind that although Facebook Timeline did away with default landing tabs, the fundamentals have not changed at all. Brands can still promote their campaigns by directing their audience directly to their unique app url. Votigo further simplified this process for you with our recent platform release.You now have the ability to schedule posts and tweets about the campaign from your Votigo dashboard to social network channels and direct people straight to that unique app URL. When you have a like-gate attached to the campaign, then you are driving users to like your page. This is a win-win! So, if you are a brand or business who is focused on engaging fans on Facebook—why not try a promotion? You can add a Like-Gate to your unique app and simultaneously build your fan base. Visit our website at www.votigo.com for more details or create an account and start engaging your fans today!

Firestone Tires: Destination America Sweepstakes

Posted on July 18, 2012 by Danielle

Firestone Tires and their agency Razorfish worked with Votigo to create a fun way to engage Firestone Tires fans with a summer promotion. Votigo created a Facebook sweepstakes app that allowed users to submit photos for a chance to win eight weeks of great prizes. To spice things up a bit, Firestone Tires decided to make each of the eight weeks a different summer challenge. The weekly Facebook contests varied from submitting a photo of a vacation spot one week to a photo of a backyard BBQ another week. Potential prizes included a trip for two to the World Series, a trip for two to a U.S. National Park, and a set of sponsor-specified destination tires.

Firestone Tires did a great job choosing prizes that fit in with the theme of their Facebook contest, as well as representing their brand by giving away tires to a lucky winner. The promotion was designed to create a fun way for people to become involved with Firestone Tires and to continue to stay involved for all eight weeks of the promotion. They did this by formatting the promotion to encourage people to upload photos and enter to win for all eight weekly challenges. Customers received one entry for simply submitting their email address, five entries for uploading a photograph that fits the weekly challenge, and ten additional entries for uploading photographs for all eight challenges.

Running this type of focused promotion that gives people the incentive to stay involved with the brand throughout the duration of the promotion is a great way to increase customer awareness and loyalty.

If you are looking for a simple and fun way to keep your customers engaged contact Votigo to learn more about sweepstakes.

Customer Q & A – Successful Photo Contest

Posted on July 13, 2012 by Hannah

Here at Votigo, we love to chat one-on-one with our customers to get their feedback and insight on the benefits they received from utilizing promotions in their social media marketing strategy. While each brand might have different goals and approaches, they all recognize the benefits from running social promotions.

Steve Oberman at Flavorus is a Votigo customer who designed a UGC Photo Contest on our platform and received phenomenal user engagement and submission. Their philosophy is the belief that life is better when you go out and experience new things and take chances. Running with that philosophy, he created a “Get Out There” Photo Contest that engaged his fans by encouraging them to upload a photo of them going out and enjoying life in every sense! The photo that received the most votes from other Flavorus Facebook users received a pair of 3-day passes to Electric Daisy Carnival 2012 in Las Vegas. His promotion is considered a true success and not just because it received over 800 entries. We wanted to pick Steve’s brain on what his goals, metrics, and overall process was so that we could share it with you all. Thankfully he was kind enough to oblige.

Votigo: Did you have goals going into the campaign?

Steve: Yes. This contest is a part of a broader plan to revamp the tone and purpose of our social media strategy, to make it more conversational and engaging. My main goal for the contest was to increase our number of “likes” on our Facebook page. To accomplish that, I could have just done a like-gate contest and run it as a sweepstakes, but since the prize is 4 three day passes to a huge music festival (a $2000 dollar value) I thought that people should have to work a little harder than just liking a page! That’s when it turned into a photo contest. My secondary goal was to incorporate our company’s core value: Life is better when you go out and experience new things,” so that’s how the theme for the contest evolved. Other goals included encouraging our followers to be more interactive with our social media and to get people talking about the contest and our page.

Votigo: How do you measure success- including the Facebook metrics and whatever else you look at?

Steve: If we can significantly increase our “likes” and get our customers talking about our client’s events, then I would consider the promotion a success.

Votigo: How has the response been?

Steve: The response has been awesome. I set the contest for an 8 week run and by the beginning of the third week we have over 500 photos submitted and 4500 votes. Our “likes” have doubled from about 50 a day to over 100 per day, and social interactions and engagement on our page have increased dramatically. People are starting to campaign for votes on their own Facebook pages which of course send their friends to us as well.

Votigo: How did you start integrating social media and how successful have you been to date?

Steve: We’re a tech company at heart, so when I joined the team late last year, the social media assets were pretty well developed. It’s been an incredibly useful tool for us to talk directly to our users and answer customer questions.

Votigo: Favorite tools & keys to success?

Steve: World class customer service and intuitive ticketing software that doesn’t crash is the key to our success.

Votigo: What is your most successful social marketing project / campaign / effort to date?

Steve: We are lucky enough to sell tickets to some amazing, world class events, so we have access to great tickets as prizes which make our contest and giveaways extremely effective. We also just launched our Facebook ticketing app which allows people to buy and sell tickets directly from Facebook, which takes advantage of the social aspect of events.

So there you have it folks! Fresh insight and words of wisdom from an experienced social media marketer who utilized a Facebook contest to engage his fans and drive brand exposure. If you are looking to integrate promotions or social engagement apps into your social media marketing strategy then please visit our website at www.votigo.com to get the details or try out our DIY tools for creating your own photo contest. It’s free to design and preview!

How to Run a Contest on Facebook

Posted on July 9, 2012 by Shayna

If you’re looking for a way to get Facebook likes, a Facebook contest or sweepstakes is the perfect way to accomplish your goals. Running a promotion on Facebook doesn’t have to be complicated – in fact, with the right tools, it’s pretty simple. The steps below outline how to run a contest on Facebook so that you can get Facebook likes and grow your audience.

Step 1: Determine Your Objectives

Clearly understanding your objectives will help determine if a contest or sweepstakes is right for you and also what format will suit your needs best. If a high number of participants is your goal, a sweepstakes is probably going to receive the largest number of entries. This is because sweepstakes are easy to enter -for the most part all you need is an email address. If you’re looking to really engage your audience, a contest is going to be a better choice for you. The easier the contest is to enter, the more entries you’ll get, which is why video contests typically receive fewer entries than photo contests.

Step 2: Outline The Details

Once you’ve decided on a format, you’ll need to decide what type of prize you’ll be offering. This may seem like something you can figure out at the last minute, but you’ll want to decide this early on and make sure it is a well thought out prize. A prize can make or break a contest. It needs to be worthwhile for the participant to enter, and it needs to be even more worthwhile for them to share your promotion with their friends.

You’ll also need to decide how your winner will be selected. If it is a contest, you can let your audience vote on the winner, or you can select a winner yourself. You can allow for multiple rounds of voting with finalists and semi-finalists or you can have one round of voting. Think about how long you want your promotion to run and what will produce the best results for you based on your objectives.

Lastly, decide what user information you’ll be collecting. One of your motivations for running a contest will likely be to collect participant info for later marketing efforts. Decide what information you’ll need to administer the contest and ask for other information sparingly. Again, the more you require of the user, the less likely they are going to be to participate, so keep it simple.

Step 3: Follow the Rules

When running a Facebook contest, it’s important to follow the Facebook promotion guidelines. These guidelines state that “Promotions on Facebook must be administered within Apps on Facebook.com, either on a Canvas Page or a Page App.” So, what does this mean? You’ll need to either create an app yourself (Votigo offers tools for that) or you need to work with a developer who creates an app for you (Votigo does that too). You also can’t use Facebook functionality as a means to enter a promotion, so “like this post to enter our sweepstakes” is not allowed – the same goes for “upload a photo to our wall to enter our contest.” You need to use an app. It’s that straightforward.

Step 4: Promote Your Promotion.

The old saying “If you build it, they will come” is certainly not the case with Facebook promotions. You need to actively promote your promotion in order to garner entries and votes. This doesn’t need to be costly or complicated, in fact – one of the best ways to promote your promotion is by simply posting about it on your Facebook wall. Timely reminders and updates to your existing audience will help ensure that your promotion is a success. Email reminders, social media posts and website mentions are all opportunities to promote your promotion. For more information on promoting your promotions check out this recent post.

Step 5: Moderate and Manage

After your promotion has been launched, you need to continue to manage the promotion. How you manage your promotion will depend upon what details and format you’ve decided upon and also what your ongoing promotional plans are. If you’ve chosen a photo contest and you are going to pre-screen submissions – you’ll need to actively approve and reject submissions throughout each day, or at least once per day. You’ll also need to select and notify a winner once your promotion has ended.

Step 6: Use The Results

Running a promotion is a great way to get leads and quality user-generated content, so make sure you use your results. Nurture your new leads with an email campaign or another promotion. You’ll also want to find ways to use your UGC entries. Often times when a contest is over the marketer fails to capitalize on the great photos, videos, essays, comments and relationships acquired during the campaign. Instead, create a photo or video gallery of the entries on your website or mix a few quotes into your advertising campaigns. Any of these will strengthen the relationship you’ve built with your customers and make your marketing more authentic.

Once your promotion has come to a close, you’ll want to analyze the results and measure success. Take a look at the promotion as a whole, there may be benefits or successes that you had not anticipated. Perhaps your promotion revealed a new market for your product, or an existing perception of your brand or offering that you were unaware of. Take a look at what content you received from entrants and see if you can glean new insights about your customers. Try and learn as much as you can from the promotion. Find out what worked, and what fell short. Take these lessons with you the next time you run a promotion and build upon your successes, while learning where you can improve your strategy.

How Promotions Influence Facebook Edgerank

Posted on June 29, 2012 by Hannah

Facebook is a powerful social network that is ideal for spreading your content to a large, active audience. The goal, as many of you know is to be seen on people’s News Feeds. If you are blindly sending out massive amounts of relevant content and no one sees it, then there isn’t much point. Luckily for brands Facebook has shared their algorithm, EdgeRank for ranking content on Facebook and filtering what appears in the news feed. The algorithm consists of three components:

1. Affinity – The number of times 2 people (or a person and a page) have interacted

2. Weight – The number of times users have interacted (commented, liked) with the content in question

3. Time Decay – The time since the content was posted. Note that Facebook moves and changes very quickly, and your news feed, for example, never has content more than 24 hours old.

Now that you have an understanding of how Facebook ranks and filters content, it is time to strategize ways to get your content seen on your fans Facebook newsfeeds!

Producing compelling content is the key is to increasing affinity and weight so that your content will be seen by a larger audience on Facebook. Unfortunately, creating compelling and original content is often one of the biggest challenges marketers are faced with. While most marketers generally acknowledge that content is crucial, many aren’t sure what kind of content their audience will respond to.

Today’s digital audience is not receptive to content that resembles “sales talk.” The main problem with the sales pitch method is that it leaves no room for customer interaction. If you take the more interactive route with marketing content and a less sales-like one, then it creates more engagement and dialogue between you and your audience. Sales talk is one of the many reasons brands may become “unfollowed” or “unliked” on Facebook. So instead, try using a promotion to engage your audience and get great user generated content! Let your audience help tell your brand story and you’ll be rewarded with increased engagement and more visibility.

Running a contest or sweepstakes ensures that you have timely and interesting content to share with your audience. An enticing prize or a fun promotion is likely to be shared by your audience, and the more people share your content, the higher your Edgerank. Getting people to engage with your promotion on Facebook will help your brand increase visibility because your brand will appear more frequently in the news feed of your audience and their friends. A contest that incorporates voting will have multiple opportunities for participation, making it much more likely for your promotion to spread to a larger, extended audience of entrants and voters. A promotion also gives you something to talk about regularly, helping you stay top of mind and at the top of the news feed.

So, there you have it! Utilizing promotions is a great way to not only keep your audience engaged and incentivized, but also to improve the Edgerank of your day-to-day communications with them!

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