Increase Your Fans and Followers

In our past issue, we discovered the techniques on how you can get people to like your Facebook business page. In this issue, we will focus on how you can make use of promotions, contests, and giveaways to entice more consumers.

Using a social media management site exclusively for promotions, contests and giveaways is a wonderful way to measure whether these said publicity tactics is working for your business. The site allows anyone to find out the number of traffic that comes to their page.

This can be a double win situation too because making the promotion exclusive will get a new set of Facebook fans which is essential to the growth and maintenance of the company’s social network page. Contests indulge more people to your page.

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

First thing you’d want to do is to be sure the updates and contest mechanics are only accessible to your Facebook users. The small business should not promote it in emails, newsletters, other social networking sites or even in their official website other than saying that the promotion is exclusive to Facebook users, of course. Also, it’s important that the mechanics are easy to understand. Overcomplicating matters would make contestants think you’ve set the bar too high and can discourage them from joining.

As an early caution, contests, incentives and promotions tend to be expensive as the applications needed to create and run it are also expensive. 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 contests within their system. Generally, a lot of different contests are not even made possible. You won’t be able to post an official contest in your Facebook wall.

However certain exceptions are at hand. In order for a contest to be legitimate, the company must be able to purchase $10,000 worth of Facebook ads in a span of three months.

As a way to cut costs, there are plenty of business applications which can assist you in producing a contest for your Fan page. Contests for Fan page is an application that was created by Wildfire and can help beginners in developing contests with photo, video, writing and visual entries. Not only that, these tools also allow you to customize. You can change the look of graphics ,control contest mechanics, deadlines as well as the level of response of people in your network. For better navigation, you can place in a contest widget in your Fan page in order for participants to link straight to a micro site. You can also build your contests and sweepstakes using tools like Vertigo and Strutta.

To really catch the attention of a lot of participants, make sure you present incentives which people can’t resist. A company named Regus, for example, offered a fully supplied business office for the photo entry which showed the messiest work space. See this as a model when coming up with your own contest. Think of prizes such as tickets to the most sough-after concert in town.

A contest that’s monitored successfully will certainly generate lots of prospects to the company. Despite the costs and additional effort, projects such as these are really worth it if only for the brownie points you win with present and potential customers.

Be sure to read our next issue of Facebook for Business.We are going to cover a few tips for making money on Facebook.

There are certainly a lot of ways to make use of Facebook for Business. Do you want to learn more, see here for additional Facebook marketing tips and tricks.