[Guest post by Jim Belosic, CEO of ShortStack]: It might be too soon to start untangling the holiday lights, but it’s never too early to be thinking about how to use Facebook effectively for holiday promotions. We are now in the final months of the year when many companies make the majority of their profits and the time of year when people are more willing to open their wallets to buy gifts and donate to charity. Some of them even go out of their way to be friendly and engage with strangers. As a business owner you can take advantage of this collective good mood and make the most of your Facebook …. presence. (Please excuse the holiday puns, I just can’t help myself!)
During the next six weeks or so, your customers might be more receptive to hearing the messages that you’ve been sending them for awhile. But in order to engage with your customers, and win over new ones, you must be genuine. At ShortStack we looked at data from 100,000 users’ Facebook pages and came up with a few best-practices for holiday Facebook marketing. Here goes:
1. Deck the Pages
Change your cover image and/or your profile picture, to reflect the season. It’s a quick and fun way to show some personality and to get your visitors thinking about the holidays. At ShortStack we change our cover image, our profile pic, our Twitter background, etc.
There are lots of companies that make Facebook cover shots you can use (we found these on www.myfacebookcovers.com) but if you want to create your own cover photo, use this handy template by one of our ShortStack designers.
2. Plan Early
If you’re an e-retailer who is offering discounts, or if you’re hosting a contest or promotion, determine when you need to end the promotion so that you can ship your product in plenty of time for the holidays. These days it’s possible to ship 24 or 48 hours before the actual day, but why add the stress and cost of last-minute shipping to your already long list of holiday to-dos? Get your in-house giveaway contests wrapped up at least a week before the big day so you can cross them off your list.
3. Decide Which Type of Contest Will Help you Reach your Holiday Sales Goals
There are four basic types of contests you can run on Facebook: sweepstakes, essay, photo and video. The type of contest you run depends on which audience you want to reach. Video, photo, and essay contests will give you lots of content for your Page, but they also require more effort on the part of the users to enter. A sweepstakes contest is easy to enter and, if you use a third-party app that offers a refer-a-friend feature (for more on this see tip #8) , your users will be more likely to share it.
4. Make a List of Who has Been Nice
Put together a list of power clients or visitors and give them an early gift. Maybe it’s an extra discount on your products, free shipping, or an extra week of the services you provide.
Photo credit: Vintage Christmas Tags
5. Get in the Spirit
Tailor campaigns to fit specific holidays rather than just doing a blanket holiday message. Thanksgiving is about family and friends, so from a social media perspective this is a time to reach out to everyone, even if you don’t have great engagement with them. During Hanukkah and Christmas, run “8 Days” or “12 Days” giveaway promotions. To ring in the New Year, look for ways to play up the idea of resolutions. People are in the mood to spend, but there’s a lot of competition for eyeballs and dollars so this is the time to take things up a notch so you can stand out in the crowded social media marketing space.
6. Give Back
Align yourself with a charity. At ShortStack, we just wrote a holiday eBook that focuses on Facebook marketing. The book’s purpose is to help our users figure out how best to use Facebook to market their products and services during the holidays. At the same time we decided to donate $100 to The Make-A-Wish Foundation for every 1000 downloads. We win because we gain new Likes — we are assuming that people will find our eBook valuable and want to share a link to it — and a charity that we work with wins because it gets a donation that it very much deserves.
7. Make it a Merry Christmas/Happy Hanukkah for Everyone
If you don’t have the staff or the time to create a special holiday-themed promotion, or aren’t ready to set up a contest, why not offer your users a coupon to anyone who Likes your page. Your current users who already like you will appreciate getting a discount — 10% off or free shipping, for example — and if your offer is a good one, they’ll want to share it with friends.
8. Encourage Your Audience to Go Tell it on the Mountain
If you are hosting a Facebook contest or promotion with a fantastic, valuable prize, you want to tell the world all about it. And you want your users to help you get the word out. So when you choose a third-party app provider, make sure it’s one that has a great sharing features built in. Using a “refer-a-friend” feature so that when users share information about your contest they get an extra entry is even more effective. People are less likely to share if they think it will dilute their chances of winning, so this strategy is a win-win: You get more exposure and your users increase their odds of winning.
9. Don’t Shoot your Eye out Before you Read Analytics
There is a ton of valuable user data you can gain via Facebook Insights. Best of all, you don’t have to ask your users for a thing. You can learn the gender, age, and location (cities and countries) of your fans or “Likes.” This basic information can help you fine-tune your promotions for future marketing efforts. How? Let’s say you learn that the majority of your Likes come from English-speaking women between the ages of 25 and 40 who live in or near Chicago, you’ll know that a big-wave-surfing video contest might not be on target for your customers (not to suggest that women don’t enjoy big-wave surfing, but you get the idea).
10. Don’t be a Grinch
If you’re going to promote your brand or product, do it in a way that makes people think “Wow!” instead of “So what.” If you’re going to give something away, and you are asking your customers for data beyond an email address, make it worthwhile. And, just as important, make it relevant to your business. Remember that people are visiting and Liking your Page because they are interested in learning more about what you offer. If you operate a housecleaning business, for example, consider giving away a truly happy way to start the new year: three months of cleaning services. If you sell digital cameras, do what GoPro does: periodically give away your full product line. The prize you offer doesn’t need to break the bank but it should reflect the effort participants need to make when they enter.
11. Think Evergreen
If you put a lot of time and money into your holiday promotions, think about how you can repurpose them year after year. For example, if you invest in graphics, don’t plaster them with a date so that you’re able to reuse your 2012 promotions in 2013 and beyond.
12. Pay Attention to Facebook’s Guidelines
Technically this tip should come first, but since many of you have probably run contests on Facebook before, you may already know that if you familiarize yourself with Facebook’s many (and ever-changing) promotion policies, you will save yourself a headache. A few of the highlights:
- Do not use a Facebook feature, such as the Like button as a way to enter or vote.
- You must notify winners via email, snail mail, phone call or singing telegram in addition to notifying them publicly on Facebook, or send them a Facebook message.
- Don’t include calls to action such as “Don’t forget to vote” or “Tell your Friends” on your Timeline cover image — and the list goes on.
That’s it for now. Here’s to a successful holiday season for all! Have you had successful holiday marketing experiences using Facebook and other social media platforms? I’d like to hear about what has worked for you in the past.
Jim Belosic is the CEO of ShortStack, a self-service custom app design tool used to create Facebook apps for Facebook Pages, websites and mobile web browsing. ShortStack provides small businesses, graphic designers, agencies and corporations with the tools to create apps with contests and forms, fan gates, product lines and more.
Let me know in the comments below if you still have the new Sidebar.
Six Ways To Effectively Promote Events on Facebook – Case Study
Any time you offer an event – live or virtual – there are several ways you can capitalize on Facebook’s tools to increase your event registrations. Thing is, many Facebook users create all manner of events and insist on inviting all their friends… only to upset those friends with the constant barrage of invitations and emails about events of no interest or relevancy. So, let’s take a look at what does work in terms of promoting events on Facebook!
First, I recommend you always have your own event sales/registration page outside of Facebook. The only exceptions might be if a) your event is coming up quickly, b) it’s free and/or c) it’s for a relatively small group. (For small group events, I recommend never, ever revealing the event location to the public. There have been many wild stories of flash mobs for private parties, including a fourteen-year-old gal in the UK with 21,000 RSVP’s for her birthday party. Yikes!)
So, once you have your own web page set up with details of your event and a way to purchase tickets, apply these six tips to generate more buzz, visibility and ticket sales:
1. Add social share buttons to your event registration page
There’s no doubt about it, numbers mean social proof. The more Facebook Likes, retweets, LinkedIn shares etc. on your blog posts and web pages the more visitors will perceive your content as being popular and will also want to share. The best place to position your social share buttons is at the top right “above the fold” (visible without scrolling). See this screenshot below of the Social Media Success Summit 2011 registration page:
Social Share Buttons on Social Media Success Summit page
At minimum, add the following social share buttons to your event registration page:
*Note the Facebook Like Button now functions (almost) the same as the Facebook Share Button. The big difference is there isn’t an obvious place to write your own narrative before posting to Facebook, plus you cannot select the thumbnail. Clicking the Facebook Like Button automatically pushes the full story into your personal Profile stream. So, you may wish to add the Facebook Share Button with Counter to your registration page instead.
Facebook Comments Plugin
I also highly recommend adding the newly upgraded Facebook Comments Plugin to your event page. I love the way the plugin now syncs with users’ Profiles or fan Pages – what that means is anytime someone writes a comment (and the button for posting to Facebook remains checked – see screenshot below), you get additional visibility for your event page!
I recently offered a couple of free Facebook marketing webinars and had my web team add the Facebook Comments Plugin to the registration page, the thank you page, and the replay page. The same plugin (and social share buttons) are on all three pages so the same numbers and comments appeared in all three places, *but* the link that gets posted on Facebook through comments – and shared through the social buttons – is the registration page. Gotta love that! Test the comments plugin live here.
Facebook Comments Plugin
You can find the new Facebook Comments Plugin here.
See also the post on Social Media Examiner with the TV show I did on 8 Ways to Use Social Share Buttons on Your Blog for additional ideas on what to add to your registration page!
2. Add a blurb to your Facebook Page banner
The image on your fan Page is prime real estate. The maximum dimensions are now 180px by 540px – I recommend taking up all that space. (Though, now that we have a list of links down the left instead of the lovely row of tabs across the top, you might want to make your fan Page image height less than 540px so more of the navigation links can be seen “above the fold.”)
Social Media Examiner do a great job of utilizing this space on their Page. As you can see, their Facebook Page image has been made to look like two banners in one. Plus, note that the call to action offers a “free sample class” which is more appealing than selling tickets directly on the banner.
Social Media Examiner Facebook Page image
You could also add images about the event to your fan Page to go across the five-photo strip with calls to action. See this post for ideas: How To Use The New Facebook Photo Viewer As A Marketing Tool.
3. Promote your registration page on your fan Page wall
So long as you consistently provide enough valuable content on your fan Page wall, you can certainly periodically promote the direct link to your event. I like to start with a question – something like “Have you got your ticket yet to this exciting event?” or “Hands up who’s attending this event?!”
You could mix up sharing the link to your registration page and the link to your Facebook Event (see next tip). The screenshot below shows a recent post by Mike revealing that over 1000 participants are already registered for this mega event – again, there’s that social proof!
Social Media Examiner Wall Post
4. Create a Facebook Event
Notice this is tip #4, not #1!
Facebook Events is one of the most mis-used and misunderstood features. There are basically two ways to create an Event on Facebook: 1) via your personal Profile and 2) via your fan Page.
If you create an Event from your personal Profile, you will have the ability to message all invitees directly into their inbox. This one feature alone makes the Events created by your Profile the most attractive. (In essence, it’s a “loophole” to “spam” all your friends! Uhoh! Also, it used to be you could select all friends at once with the use of a javascript snippet in your browser’s address bar; however, as of recently that trick no longer works. Probably a good thing too!) UPDATE 4.4.11: Thank you to Courtney Parham for pointing out that the javascript code does still work; it changed to this one.
With the new Messages product many Event emails are now bypassing the Inbox and go straight to the “Other” folder.
HOT TIP: If you’d rather not receive Event invitations/emails from certain friends but you don’t want to unfriend him/her, help is at hand! There’s a little-known feature on Facebook that allows you to block Event invitations from specific friends. Just go to Account > Privacy > Block Lists > scroll to Block event invites and type in the friend’s name. Voila. Your friend will be none the wiser.
I strongly suggest you create a Facebook Event via your fan Page for any business-related events and keep the personal/social events for your Profile. Just click the Events link on the left of your fan Page, then click the “Create an Event” button.
The downside with Page-created Events is you cannot message all invitees – you can only send an “Update” and it goes to all fans, just as if you are sending a regular Update from your fan Page. However, if you think of your Facebook Event as an outpost for additional engagement between potential attendees, attendees and yourself as the host, you’ll get more traction.
Once your Facebook Event is set up, you can always ask your invitees (via the Event wall and via periodic Updates) and ask your fans (via your Page wall) to invite their friends and/or to post the Event on their Profile. This gives you extra viral visibility around Facebook. See screenshot below – the Share feature is now a link at the top just under the event title.
Social Media Success Summit 2011 - Facebook Event
One thing to note about Facebook Events, you’ll want to make it really clear there is a link that Facebook users need to click in order to register. Some people might think that by clicking the “I’m Attending” button they have signed up for your event. Write periodic updates and messages on the Event wall to encourage everyone to go get their ticket if they haven’t already.
Also, the Event photo/graphic is one of the most important features – when users share the Event around Facebook, the thumbnail of the image goes with it.
5. Offer live micro events on your fan Page
A regular feature that Social Media Examiner does really well on their Facebook Page is “Expert Fridays” where a subject matter expert spends one hour answering questions directly on the fan Page wall. In the midst of a Summit promotion, Mike makes a point of featuring instructors from the upcoming Summit as guest experts. This helps to introduce the faculty to Mike’s community, provides tremendous value, and helps to further build social equity.
Example Expert Friday - Guest from previous Summit
Mike says:
I have often hosted micro events myself, such as a “flash chat” using an app like Clobby. Or an impromptu webinar using livestreaming apps like Vpype or the new Linqto (coming out of beta next month). Bottom line, many of your fans are on Facebook throughout the day and just love to interact with you LIVE! Use this engagement as an opportunity to add value and to seed your upcoming event.
6. Encourage attendees to engage and share
Once participants have signed up for your event, encourage them to come write on your Facebook Event wall and engage through other social channels. For the Social Media Success Summit 2011, Mike has a whole section for attendees called “Social Networking” which includes an invitation to join the private LinkedIn Group, interact on the Facebook Event page, tweet about the Summit, add an Attendee Badge to their website. Plus, a widget displays the livestream of #smss11 tweets, and all Summit instructors photos and Twitter IDs are displayed too.
Attendee Social Networking
And, here’s a bonus tip:
Include a “Share on Facebook” badge in all your promotional emails!
I created this badge, which you’re welcome to use:
Click the badge above to give it a try! The badge shares this blog post and you’ll have a chance to add your own comment and select a thumbnail.
To make your own link code for sharing your content on Facebook, use this: http://www.facebook.com/share.php?u=XXX (replace XXX with your event URL including the http://).
Join the web’s largest Social Media event!
These Summits are among my favorite events each year. I’m honored to be a presenter and I also make a point of attending all the other sessions and join in the live tweeting – the content is second to none. Unlike events where the content is light and the pitching is heavy, the Social Media Success Summit is heavy on content and has zero pitching! By attending this Summit you’ll be able to apply practical social media marketing methods right away that will help you to create more visibility, reach more customers and take your business to the next level.
I’m leading two all-new sessions on Facebook marketing at the Summit this year:
Come join me and 21 other subject-matter experts at this year’s Social Media Success Summit!
The Social Media Success Summit 2011 expert instructors include many of my favorite thought leaders in the new media space: Jeremiah Owyang (Altimeter Group), Brian Solis (author, Engage), Frank Eliason (Citigroup), Erik Qualman (author, Socialnomics), Michael Stelzner (founder, Social Media Examiner), Dan Zarrella (author, The Social Media Marketing Book), Andy Sernovitz (author,Word of Mouth Marketing), and David Meerman Scott (author, Real-Time Marketing & PR). Plus, experts from Verizon, Boeing, Intel, and Cisco will be sharing their proven social media tactics and strategies.
I trust you found some valuable tips for increasing your event registration in this post! What did I miss? Have you successfully used Facebook Ads to sell more event tickets? What other social media event promotion ideas have you seen that work well? Let me know in the comments below!