Draw In Social Media Followers Using special offers

In our earlier issue, we discovered the methods on how to get individuals to like your Facebook business page. In this issue, we will focus on how you can reap the benefits of promotions, contests, and giveaways to bring in more people.

Utilizing a social media management site entirely for promotions, contests and giveaways is a very good way to assess whether these said marketing tactics are working for your company. Based on the given stats provided by the website, you can determine how much traffic the tactics were able to bring in during its run.

This can be a double win situation too because making the promotion exclusive will garner a new set of Facebook fans which is vital to the progress and maintenance of the company's social network page. Contests give a touch of enthusiasm to your site.

Now that you know this, let's proceed to how you can implement Facebook marketing and begin making traffic-pulling contests and promos.

The very first thing you'd want to do is to ensure that the updates and contest mechanics are only accessible to your Facebook users. Be certain that you don't promote it in your newsletters, social networks or even in the official website. You can however say that the contest is exclusive for Facebook users only. As an additional necessity, the mechanics have to be simple and clear. Overcomplicating matters would make contestants think you've set the bar too high and can discourage them from joining.



Take note that offering contests, incentives and promos can be a bit costly as these require some Facebook applications and other programs for them to run smoothly. For example, the application Wildfire has a $5 setup fee and charges $0.99 for each day the campaign runs. In addition to that, Facebook has strict rules when it comes to running prize draws within their network. In general terms, most prize draws are not even allowed. You are not allowed to have an official contest posted in your wall.

However certain exemptions are at hand. In order for a competition to be valid, the business must be able to pay for $10,000 worth of Facebook ads in a length of three months.

As a way to cut costs, there are plenty of business applications which can assist you in building a contest for your Fan page. Contests for Fan page is an application that was created by Wildfire and can help newbie in creating contests with photo, video, writing and visual entries. Not only that, these tools also allow you to tailor-make. You can alter campaign mechanics, deadlines of contests, the number of votes allowed per person and the level of response of your network. To make navigation simple, consider placing a contest widget in your Fan Page so the members will be able to link instantly to a mini site. There are also other contest builder tools like Vertigo and Strutta.

To really get a lot of participants, make sure you offer incentives which people can't refuse. A company named Regus, for instance, offered a fully supplied workplace for the photo entry which showed the messiest work space. But you shouldn't stop there. More one of a kind prizes include dinner with celebrities or a chance to attend a star-studded party.

A contest that's managed successfully will most certainly generate lots of qualified prospects to the organization. For some small businesses, tasks like these may need a large amount of consideration. However, this can be on the list of most effective techniques to raise business awareness on Facebook.

Be sure to read our next issue of Facebook for Business.We will talk about a very interesting topic: Creating wealth on Facebook!