Are you looking for effective Social media Strategy to increase the Facebook fans on your page? You can do so by organizing contests on your social media page and enhance the fans engagement eventually. Grabbing eyeballs and hooking loyal customers becomes easier by organising successful contests for social media marketing.
Tips for Organising Contests on Social media
Tip 1: Use the 3rd Party Applications
You should know the guideline of social media you are planning to use and then plan the contest for grand success
Tip2: Shell out Prizes which draw maximum attention
Brainstorming and finding the attractive prizes which catch the fancy of maximum customers or target audience is another tip.
Tip3: Simplicity is the key
Make the contest simple along with the rules, idea and implementation. This will attract more people. The contest should not be very lengthy as they do not want to spend hours solving the contest.
Tip 4: Make the contest creative and catchy
The contest should be entertaining and should excite the contestants to engross them in being part of your social media page.
Tip 5: Give the fans the power to select the Winner
This will add a zing and zest to your contest as the fans would be deciding the winner and your social media page will get a raise in the fan base.
Tip 6: Promoting the contest is vital
Make the promotions of the contest both online as well as offline. Online presence can be created using newsletters, email, blogs etc.
Social marketing approach today demands quick thinking so that you can adapt to the changing market demands quickly.
Almost every business today has a Facebook page and with the site’s rules getting more stringent by the day, it is becoming increasingly difficult for small businesses to make their mark in FB’s competitive world.
In my experience the best strategy therefore is to unite with other small forces and gain leverage from each other’s network. This means it makes sense for small businesses to identify blogs/common interest sites and run promotional campaigns in partnership with them.
For example, let’s say you are a small business that markets baby products. Now the best social media approach for you would be to identify blogs that cater to young mothers and contact them to run a giveaway promotion. How does this tie in with Facebook promotion you wonder?
Well, for one the blog you partner with will publicize the giveaway on their FB fan page, this way you get visibility among their fanbase. Secondly, the giveaway will generate a buzz about your business among the blog’s regular readers. Third by giving something away for free you will be giving people a reason to spread the word about your business among their friends!
Another smart social marketing approach is to create cross-promotional discount campaigns with businesses that you are not in competition with. For example, if you run a salon for women, you may distribute discount coupons of a local shoe store and request the business owner to do the same for you through his/her social network.
Social marketing approach today is all about seeking innovative ways to reach out to bigger networks of people. Good Luck!
Social marketing approach can help define your success with online marketing. It isn’t necessary to spend huge amounts on placing ads in social media networks. Of course paid advertising yields dividends, however, if you do not have the budget for it, you can still gain visibility in social media networks like Facebook by adopting a smart social marketing approach.
Creating and marketing your Facebook page is one of the simplest strategies for promoting your small business online. The good news is that several support organizations have taken the initiative to help small businesses market and promote themselves!
For example, SSB- Supporting small business is a page where small businesses can literally shout about what they are doing and offer services to other small businesses. So, the FB page effectively acts as a platform for small businesses to let potential partners and customers know about their wares.
For instance, let’s say you offer bookkeeping and VA services, you can advertise yourself for free and let other small business know how you can assist them. The page owners also take initiative by promoting different business through their posts.
The only thing that you need to do in order to put your promotional message on the page is to like it! In fact according to the recent Facebook changes, you can now also post on every page you like. So, if you have a new event or sale coming up, you can post a message on pages wherein you feel you might be able to catch your potential clients.
The advantage of posting on dedicated Small Business Support pages like SSB though is that you can be sure that your post won’t be removed (unless of course its offending) and you will be reaching an audience of active fans who post on the page and follow it regularly, as it serves their personal interest.
Another great way to get your business visibility is by joining communities related to your niche area. The biggest upside of this is that when you post in a community messages are sent out to all members, so you have a greater chance of being heard. The thing to remember here though is that most communities may not accept overtly promotional messages, unless they are dedicated to supporting small businesses.
Social marketing approach when drafted smartly can do wonders for your business’ branding! It’s all about being aware of the most cost-effective strategies.
Focused online marketing is the only way to create a clear strategy for your branding and promotion in the virtual world.
The first thing that you need to do is to divide your online marketing campaign in phases and then ask yourself, what exactly do you hope to achieve in each phase.
For instance, the first phase could be about building a presence and spreading awareness about your business, the second phase could be about gaining a better understanding of the market, in the third face your focused online marketing could be about expanding your customer base and the fourth phase could be designed to focus on customer retention and follow-up.
Once you have decided on the phase, you can move on to drafting your strategy for each stage of your focused online marketing. Blogs and article marketing are excellent tools for spreading awareness, setting up social media listening stations could help you understand the market better, organizing contests and on Facebook and other social networks can be a great customer expansion strategy and interacting with your clients and customers through social media networks, setting up a web-based support ticket features, etc, can be online marketing exercises that could help you retain your customers.
Focused online marketing is nothing but adopting a result oriented approach, wherein you choose your marketing tools and strategies based on the results you expect. This obviously works better than a haphazard approach where you include article marketing, blogging, social media and whatever other marketing tools you can think of in your strategy and expect them to help you build your brand and attract more customers in one go.
Social media campaigns can do wonders for your business if managed well. There are professionals in the market, trained for this job and you would do well to hire such a specialist online marketing company, because if you launch a social media campaign but don’t manage it well, it could well harm your brand.
There are numerous examples where well-meaning employees have created pages on social media sites and then ignored them. If this happens your campaign will sink without a trace.
Your Social media campaign should be entrusted in the hands of someone, who can stay focused on the task. This is where a social media agency comes in. they are trained to manage every aspect of your social media campaign. All you need to do is inform them about new products or services that you are offering your clients and they will post it and follow it up on relevant social networks that suit the clientele you are looking to target.
Sounds simple and straightforward, doesn’t it? Well, it is if you choose the right agency. Here are some tips to help you with selection:
Hire only that social media consultant who has a strong presence on any social media site it claims to work with.
Look for the online presence of their previous clients. Take stock of the kind of promotions they have run and find out to what extent are they engaged with the followers of the particular brand. This is important because if you go just by the number of followers the company has, it can be misleading.
It is only when you see how much interaction is happening with the followers, will you get a true picture of the company’s ability. A large number of followers, but very little interaction stinks of statistical padding, rather than real estimation.
Social media campaign is a highly specialized genre, so when selecting an agency to manage it for you, make sure you hire one that is a dedicated social media agency. You would do well to remember that there are many kinds of online marketing and different companies specialize in different sections. You need one that will not only launch the campaign but also follow it up as well by interacting with your followers, replying to their posts and keeping them happy.
Social media is the latest and fastest growing tool of communication. Consequently, if used well, it can become an easy way to establish your brand far and wide. These are a few obvious advantages of using social media to promote your brand:
What you need to remember though is that social media can be a double edged sword. The fact that it has the potential to spread awareness about your brand very far, very quickly, means that you need to be especially careful about what you want people to know about your brand. Make sure you are consistent and focused when telling people about the brand. If you write self-serving content, it is more likely to damage you and your brand’s reputation in the long run.
Also since social media is a much more intimate medium it is more conducive to forming long lasting relationships with prospective clients. As with every other relationship, honesty is the foundation of this one as well. Thus, you must make sure that your brand comes across as genuine and real. This doesn’t mean that you have to openly advertise your business vulnerabilities, but create realistic expectations and always give your customers/clients the advice that is in their best interests.
Social media can also be used as a powerful tool to interact and network with other competitors as well as market leaders in the same field. In fact these sites can also prove to be excellent platforms for finding businesses’ for cross promotion ventures. For instance, let’s say you run a toy store, you may be able to get into a cross promotion arrangement with a company or designer who sells children’s apparels, provided both of you cater to the same client base.
Social media sites that you choose for your campaign play a critical role in determining its success. Ideally, the sites that you choose must have:
An identifiable user base of members who fit into your target customer profile: This means you must study the social media sites first and check how active the communities related to your niche area are. For example, let’s say you run a home security equipments business and are wondering whether SMM on Facebook and Twitter will serve your purpose?
A good way to determine the same is to study the communities on Facebook first. Your target market is pretty vast, however, prospects most likely to get converted into customers for you would be single women, working parents and well to do homeowners. So, the best thing for you to would be to run a people’s search for these groups on Twitter and a community search on Facebook. If you notice that your target customer groups are active on these social media sites, you know you are on the right track.
In fact when it comes to social media sites, going niche is also a great idea. This means that focusing niche networks related to your area of operation are likely to get you better results. Taking the home security equipments example again, networks of working moms, parenting networks, etc, would be great platforms to promote your products that are most relevant to these groups.
Social Media sites if chosen well can truly do wonders for your business’ growth!
Using Social Media can get you phenomenal results, as long as you know how to gain the maximum leverage from these platforms.
Never underestimate the power of social exposure and relevance. In fact, using Social Media to market any business has become a growing trend across all industries. Imagine getting better results without having to spend on traditional marketing methods. Here are some great tips that will help you gain the most from your social media marketing campaigns:
Using Social Media to grow your business can be an excellent strategic decision that put you on the fast track for growth. Are you ready to take your big leap?
Internet Marketing Promotion Ideas Internet marketing promotion is one of the most cost-effective ways of expanding your customer base. For small businesses, especially, Internet marketing is an excellent way to establish a brand image within a limited budget. The following are two little known but effective Internet marketing promotion ideas:
Low competition Long Tail Keywords: Long tail keywords are 3-4 word phrases. These keywords work well from SEO perspective, as they are likely to get you better results. Let’s take a simple example, say you run an online fashion store and if you choose a single word like “Fashion” as your keyword, then you are likely to face a lot of competition. However, if you were to choose a long tail keyword like ‘Fashion Tips For Women’, you are likely to get better results quickly as the competition will be less. Ideally, you should choose a long tail keyword with over 1000 monthly searches.
Niche Network Marketing: There are social networks and there are niche social networks. The latter are those that are focussed on common interests, professions, geographical areas, age groups, etc. Baby-boomer, young entrepreneur, parenting, music and books based social networking sites are examples of these niche networks. They are excellent platforms for marketing as they offer entrepreneurs their target customer bases on a platter. For example, let’s say you run a small plumbing business, community based social networks in your target region would be the best platforms for you to market your services.
Internet marketing promotion ideas can help you turn around your small business. So, if you haven’t explored virtual world marketing options, it’s time you started.
Strategic Internet Marketing or Offline Advertisements? Strategic Internet Marketing is an essential tool for small businesses that are usually grappling with tight budgets and low-awareness levels.
Think about it. For any new business to get noticed, it needs to get as much exposure and visibility among its target audience. Sure, you could spend truckloads of money on a full page advertisement in the local newspaper, but it would not have as much impact as a simple low-cost Strategic Internet Marketing model would. And if tight budgets are the bane of your existence, then Strategic Internet Marketing is the only way to get your business visibility.
The first step in Strategic Internet Marketing is to create a website. Your website is the first door to your business that will allow you to showcase your products and services. Unlike what people will have you believe a basic website can actually be set up for about a $1500-2000.
Strategic Internet Marketing involves other aspects like search engine optimization, article marketing, and social media marketing. All these are cost-effective options that can produce excellent results. You can join most social media websites for free and the writing market is quite competitive, so if you are smart you can get a good article writer for less than 1/10th the price of a real world publicist.
Strategic Internet Marketing elements must be combined together in order to get due visibility for your business. For instance, if you have just opened a business of selling cupcakes online, then your strategy should include designing an appealing website, writing articles on cupcake designs and recipes, advertising online, etc.
Strategic Internet Marketing becomes very important for small-scale businesses due to their heavy reliance on the internet medium for generating awareness for their products. Given the affordability of internet marketing, whether through banner advertisements, article marketing, micro blogging, etc, most small businesses use the digital platform to drive their marketing objectives. Hence, a Strategic Internet Marketing approach is crucial to a successful internet marketing campaign.
First and foremost, create a website for your business. A website will be the official spokesperson for your business where prospective buyers can find detailed information about your company, the services you offer and your brand promise.
Second, ensure that your website content is entertaining, exciting, visually stimulating and interesting. Today, in order to break the advertising clutter, marketers need to be as creative as possible to make their content attractive and entertaining. Strategic Internet Marketing can be best achieved with top-notch content that drives engagement with the audience.
Moving on, accelerate all your search engine optimization efforts toward Google. Today more than three-fourths of all searches, especially for new products and services, are done through Google. Hence it becomes very important for small businesses to align their SEO operations to be as Google-friendly as possible.
Another popular approach to Strategic Internet Marketing is leveraging social networking websites, especially if your business is targeted toward youngsters. Today youngsters are constantly wired and perpetually connected via social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. Since such websites are used primarily for information exchange and sharing of thoughts and desires, small businesses would do well to cash in on the lively traffic. Establish Strategic Internet Marketing initiatives such as creating a Facebook fan page and running contests on it for your fans. Give away freebies to encourage word-of-mouth publicity too!
Strategic Internet Marketing definitely pays great dividends in the long run. Especially for small businesses that have to contend with tighter purse-strings, Strategic Internet Marketing will give them a bigger bang for their buck.
Viral Campaigns are one of the best and most effective ways to get people talking about your brand. As the name suggests, Viral Campaigns are those marketing efforts that cause your brand message to permeate across the web audience with virus-like speed. Essentially, such marketing campaigns trigger off a ripple-effect across the web with audiences typically passing on the news to more and more people.
Since the success of Viral Campaigns relies on people’s inclination to spread the word, it goes without saying that Viral Campaigns should be interesting, unique and have superior content. If it’s eye-catching, then there are greater chances of the campaign going viral.
One of the best ways to make your Viral Campaigns attractive is by attaching a freebie or offering your audience a free gift for every time they spread the word. For instance, if you are running a campaign via email, offer customers a free cap or mug if they forward that email to 20 other people.
An easy way to achieve successful Viral Campaigns is by designing unique videos about your brand. Previously unreleased advertisements, quirky videos, humorous videos etc. spread like forest fire.
Viral Campaigns can have a self-sustaining effect on social networking platforms like facebook, twitter, linkedIn etc. Viral Campaigns can benefit greatly from the high degree of involvement and interaction on such sites.
