30 Simple Social Media Conversation Starters

Posted on October 21, 2015 by Jim

Now that you’ve worked hard on getting people to ‘like’ your Facebook page, Follow you on Twitter and Instagram through some exciting Facebook contests, social sweepstakes, a couple of interesting guest posts and other branding exercise, you may wake up realizing that you’re not quite sure how to keep all the fans that you now have. And this is just the beginning; the next road is a long one where you’ll need to keep talking to your audience while keeping them interested and engaged with your page.

Some say that social media is like your first date. You may be good at getting dates, but once you’ve actually get them, you’ll need to keep them from leaving… you..

There are many ways of keeping someone engaged with you, but one thing’s for sure – if you want to start a conversation, you’ll need to ask the question. Questions are great to get your audience to comment and contribute to the topic. That is why I’ve come up with a list of questions that you can ask your fans.

There are many different types of conversation starters. Here are a few conversation starters and how some great examples of using them.

Types of conversation starters.

1. Related to your industry

If you’ve targeted your fans correctly, then it is likely that your fans had liked your page to keep in touch with your industry. Keep your audience listening by sparking conversations about your main industry.

2. Random Questions

It’s the element of surprise – that brilliant randomness, those silly questions, and that Gangnam Style. Surprise your audience and spark their interest with some out of the world questions.

3. Personal Interest

Got an interest? A hobby? A game of football? A bite to eat? A pint to drink? Share personal interests by asking your audience what they do when they’re off-duty. Get up close and personal and build stronger relations with your audience by listening to they’re up to.

4. Helping others

Help your fellow community member by asking frequently asked questions and helping a fan out. Present questions to the rest of the audience and help solve their problems. It’s all about community spirit! Alternatively, you can help others by putting the spotlight on them and allowing them to share their page, blog post for others to check. Here is an example by Social @ Blogging Tracker

Below are 30 conversation starters for your social media accounts.

What’s your biggest question about ______. Our experts will answer them.
What’s your #1 goal to achieve in ______ this month/year?
What books are you reading this week?
What is your favorite _______ blogs?
What do you usually share on social media?
What is your biggest challenge in ________
What excites you every day?
What’s the best article you read today/ this week?
If you could be anywhere right now, where would you be?
My favorite thing about ____ is _____
What are your plans for the weekends?
What’s in your book list that everyone should read?
Where do you usually blog / tweet?
What are your biggest mistakes in ___ when you started?
If you could have dinner with anyone, who would it be?
What Facebook page would you like to share with us?
What song / quote describes YOU?
What’s number #1 on your to-do list today?
How often do you check your email / Facebook / Twitter?
How many times do you log into Facebook a day?
Who’s your biggest role model?
What is the first book that you read that changed your life?
Coffee or tea?
Chocolate or cheese cake? (one of my most responded questions, best answer was … chocolate cheese cake)
If you could re-invent something, what would it be?
What do you love most about _______ ?
When was the last time you were really nervous?
Whose life do you wish you could live for a day?
What film have you most enjoyed this year?
What’s the thing/page/ would you consider yourself a “number one fan” of?

Hope you like the list and don’t hesitate to share it out if you do. If this is something you would like more of, then I’ll come up with 30 questions every month in the hope that it will inspire you to post more questions and get your fans to engage with you.

What would you add to the list? Share them below and it will be in our next post.
Original post by Adam.

Great Ways to Customize your Marketing Campaigns

Posted on April 4, 2013 by Danielle

Customizing your campaigns allows you to connect with your customers on a deeper level. It is a good idea to tailor your campaign to your own company, products, and creativity. One great way to customize your marketing campaigns and excite your fans is to offer prizes that are targeted to what your fans like, want, and need. These prizes should also be congruent with your company and your marketing goals.

Another way to customize your marketing campaigns is to leverage social applications to further engage users. These social apps can include:

Galleries for fan photos and videos, which allow users to look through other fan entries and see how other people are using your brand and products and engaging with your company. This is a great way to create a community among your fans and incorporate user-generated content into your marketing efforts.
Signup forms, which allow you to gather contact information from everyone who engages with your campaign. This is a great way to generate leads and new customers.
Surveys, which are a great way to find out more information about your fans and how they interact with your company, brand, or products.
Facebook apps, which allows you to customize your Facebook page with Facebook apps that encourage interaction or serve a marketing purpose and speak to your audience.
Marketing Pages, which allow you to display marketing messages or promotional graphics in a Facebook app. You can add a hyperlink to the images to direct users to your website.

It is important to customize the conversation you are having with your fans on social media and with the social conversation manager app it is simple to stay connected and to schedule posts and updates to your social media channels. Scheduled posts are a great way to customize your campaign and create a specific timetable for your content. You can also tailor your content by targeting your messages to specific locations and managing your global presence with language targeting.

These applications are a great way to individualize your promotions and marketing efforts. For more information on how to customize your campaigns contact us today!

How to Use Social Media for Business

Posted on February 26, 2013 by Danielle

Social media has changed the way the world communicates, creating real time interconnectivity between people, businesses, and geographies. As social media continues to grow in popularity, brands are looking for ways to increase their fan base and leverage their social presence to increase sales and brand affinity.

Here are 5 ways to leverage social media for business so that you can maximize your social marketing efforts.

1. Drive Conversations:

Social media is a powerful tool for engaging your customers and fans in a conversation. Open up two-way communication between your business and your consumers to provide a way to stay connected with your fans and to introduce your brand to those who are less familiar. Interact with your fans and reply to what they have to say. By engaging in conversation, you’ll gain exposure on social channels and increase credibility by getting your customers to refer your brand or talk about their experience with your company.

Everyone has experienced the amazing ability that word-of-mouth has to spread a message instantly and to a large amount of people. Social media does exactly that. It acts as a catalyst of word-of-mouth, making it easy for your fans to recommend your brand to their peers. Social media is a vehicle that allows and encourages your customers to connect and interact with each other, sharing details about your company and products. Statistics show that 53% of active social networkers follow a brand on social media, and 60% of those who use digital methods to research about the products they intend to buy, learned about it on social media sites. Get your fans talking about your brand and you’ll be rewarded with better brand awareness and sales.

2. Get to know your audience better:

Not only is social media a great tool for allowing your audience to get to know you, it is also a way for you to get to know them. Social media can be used as a way to gather consumer research. Many of your fans are using social media as a way to show the world who they are. Observe what information your fans put out there and use that information to get to know them and their expectations in regards to your brand or products. Consumer research can be used in every aspect of your marketing efforts; it is imperative to know who you are marketing to and what they anticipate. By listening to your fans, you’ll have a better understanding of how to be successful marketing to them.

3. Provide customer service:

Before the boom of social media, customers would have to write a letter or call the company’s customer service line if they were unhappy with a product or service. Today, with the growth and pervasiveness of social media, these customer service complaints can be resolved online almost instantly. Customers can access the Internet everywhere and at anytime, therefore making it easier to communicate and receive responses to their questions in a more efficient manner.

Immediate response through social media is the kind of service customers are beginning to expect and demand. This is an example of how social media marketing can help increase brand loyalty and customer retention. If you provide excellent customer service, your customers will be more likely to buy from you in the future.

4. Educate and inspire:

To help build a relationship with your fans, you need to offer them something compelling – an incentive to engage with you. Creating and sharing great content that is relevant to your brand can help build a sense of trust with your audience and keep people interested in following your brand. People are often looking towards brands for information. Determine what type of content your audience responds to by trying out different types of content and experimenting. Think about how your brand fits into your audiences’ lifestyle and try to create and share content that your fans will be excited about. If you are able to educate or inspire your fans, you’ll build affinity, trust, and most importantly keep them interested and engaged with your brand on social media.

When in the process of creating interesting content the most important thing to be thinking about is your target audience. When creating content it is not only about writing, it is important to read what is out there already and what has been getting your audience’s attention. Find out what your audience finds interesting and adapt this so that it works in conjunction with your brand or business.

Another way to create content that is interesting to your audience is to create content that answers their questions. This can help your customer service as well, because you’ll be providing answers to commonly asked questions without having to address each customer individually.

An added benefit of creating great content is that it can help your SEO efforts and drive traffic to your website. By conducting keyword research and determining what your customers are searching for, you can better understand what they are looking for and tailor your content to their needs.

5. Run a promotion:

Promotions such as contests and sweepstakes are a fun and simple way to engage your fans and customers, allowing them to interact with your company. Promotions help create buzz and excitement around your brand, generating awareness and exposure.

When choosing what type of promotion to run, such as a photo or video contest versus a sweepstakes, you should analyze which type of promotion better suits your goals. For example, a photo or video contest is a fun way to get your fans involved and engaged, however this type of promotion requires more time and effort from your customers and fans. This means that while you are engaging fans with your brand or business, you may also receive fewer entries. It is a good idea to invite users to stay involved by allowing them to vote on the best entry. Sweepstakes, on the other hand, have a lower barrier to entry with the only requirement being to enter your email. This allows for more fans to be inclined to enter, but also means there is less engagement.

Both forms of promotions are beneficial in different ways; it depends on what end goal is more important to your marketing efforts. It is possible to run a sweepstakes and a photo contest simultaneously, but you must make sure to do so in a beneficial and smart way. You want to make sure that the two promotions vary enough so that they are not repetitive. An example of this would be to run a weekly trivia sweepstakes with a question and winner of the week, alongside a shorter photo contest.

For your promotion to be a successful marketing tool, it is important to offer prizes that relate to your brand, business, or products. It is often a good idea to offer your own products as the prize; this is a cost effective way to ensure that your customers will try your products and build excitement around your brand. If you are a travel company for example, you could run an effective promotion that offers a free vacation or a free stay at a resort.

Social media continues to grow and evolve. With this in mind, the role social media plays in marketing will continue to transform the relationship between brands or businesses and their audiences. The great thing about social media marketing is that as a marketer you have the ability to transform how social media is utilized. The ideas outlined in this guide can act as a starting point for you to develop a social marketing strategy and plan.

Announcing Votigo’s Social Marketing Suite

Posted on July 10, 2012 by Votigo

Today is an exciting day for Votigo. We’ve officially announced our full Social Marketing Suite, expanding the scope of our software and services beyond social promotions. This is a milestone day for us: as we celebrate our 6th anniversary as a company, it allows us to meet the needs of our existing customers while targeting new ones with an always-on subscription product for managing their customers and social conversation across all social channels.

We are very proud of what our team has developed in recent weeks and really since we launched Votigo in 2006. Major advances like this are a true team effort and we appreciate everyone’s hard work, from our California office to our Colorado to our Hyderabad office.

Our Software-as-a-Service platform enables marketers to run cross-channel promotions, manage conversations and social contacts and analyze metrics across Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Web, and Mobile. Fortune 500 enterprises, mid-market companies, and growing small businesses alike are already using our flexible, proven software to manage social marketing at any scale, for single brands and users to complex international enterprises. Some of Votigo’s current SaaS customers include Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, Sony Online Entertainment, Kaiser-Permanente, NCM Fathom Events, Energizer, and GoPro.

Votigo is used to manage brand-consistent promotions across 1,000 unique Facebook Pages for Starwood Hotel & Resorts Worldwide; to allow growing businesses of all sizes to run promotions and marketing apps for as low as $15 per month; and to execute international cross-channel promotions on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Web and Mobile for category-leading brands like Ford, Fox, JBL, Random House and many more. With the launch of our Social Marketing & CRM Suite, we now offer a full set of tools that our customers- the market’s leading social businesses- demand.

At the Enterprise level, Votigo’s platform allows for multiple administrators, user hierarchies and workflow management. Abbey Reider, Global Search & Social Media Strategy, Starwood Hotels & Resorts Worldwide, said, “With over 1,000 hotel Facebook pages Votigo’s Platform provides a scalable solution that satisfies our corporate and legal team needs, while allowing our individual hotels the autonomy to create unique and engaging promotions.”

“This is a very natural evolution for us,” says Jim Risner, CEO and Co-Founder. “For nearly six years we’ve been fortunate to work with world-class brands and agencies, and fulfill their social promotions needs with innovative campaigns for any channel and in any country. We’ve always been known for our strong technology platform and excellent service. We’ve listened to our clients who were looking for an always-on approach to promotions and the ability to manage the conversation and track and target social contacts. We’re very excited to be expanding our platform to be a single, comprehensive software solution that handles all their social marketing needs.”

Votigo’s Social Marketing & CRM Suite includes:

• Promotions Manager – A full-featured platform for publishing the cross-platform promotions that Votigo has been known for since 2007. Marketers can launch photo and video contests, sweepstakes, and other promotional apps to engage their audiences in multiple languages across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and other social networks on mobile and the web. Promotions Manager powers the full promotion cycle, from creating the apps, to sharing and publicizing them to social audiences, to moderating submissions and fan commentary, making it simple and cost-effective to run promotional campaigns throughout the year. Promotions remain one of the most effective marketing tactics for engaging and activating social audiences and Promotions Manager makes it simpler than ever to run promotions of any scope.

• Conversation Manager – A powerful new interface for managing two-way conversations with fans on Facebook, Twitter and beyond. Marketers can use Votigo’s Conversation Manager to simultaneously schedule and publish posts, links, photos and video and promotional campaigns to multiple social channels and accounts, plus manage responses, user-generated content, comments and interactions with fans. By consolidating all social conversations and accounts into a single interface, Conversation Manager saves marketers time and provides actionable insight to effectively measure post engagement.

• Social CRM – A seamlessly-integrated Social CRM system for managing Social Contacts, tracking engagement and influence, and targeting special offers and communications. Votigo’s Social CRM makes it easy to cultivate and maintain a growing audience across social networks – from Facebook to Twitter to LinkedIn and beyond – within a single platform

• Engagement Apps – A set of rich engagement applications including photo and video galleries, fan exclusives, polls, coupons, and more, each with a clear marketing purpose designed to engage your customers on an ongoing basis.

• Analytics – Votigo analytics let social marketers quickly measure and assess social marketing efforts to understand how their audiences interact with their businesses, focus on what resonates and activates customers, and optimize social marketing resources.

We are still planning continuous updates to the Social Marketing & CRM Suite throughout the remainder of 2012. And we couldn’t be more excited about the expansion of our product offering and the continued growth of Votigo. We’ve had 1,400% revenue growth from 2008-2011 and 15% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth for the past year without having to raise more capital. Most importantly we’ve added 300 new customers in the last twelve months. We’re amazed at what our small team of talented people has been able to accomplish.”