This article is written by Eric Taylor
Historically, one of the best ways to receive contact information from individuals is to offer them something in exchange for it. It’s a quid pro quo kind of deal here, with both parties receiving something of worth.
For the contact, they’re receiving a great prize. For the business, they’re receiving a lead to throw into the funnel. If a business plays its cards right, they’ll end up with a lot of new customers.
Facebook has become the biggest social networking site in the world, and those out there with a business Facebook page naturally hold different promotions in order to increase their contacts.
If you’ve been thinking about starting up a Facebook promotion, here are the essential steps to help you pull it off without a hitch.
A Successful Facebook Promotion in 5 Steps
1: Define Your Purpose
First and foremost, you should define your purpose – the reason for holding the promotion. Do you want to spread your brand’s name throughout the social atmosphere, or do you want to generate business leads for future customers?
Defining your purpose is going to help you when creating the promotion and selecting the prize to give away. It also allows you to develop a strategy. Example: If you’re just spreading brand awareness, your target market can be more general, whereas acquiring leads will require a narrower focus.
2: Know the Rules
Facebook has a lot of different rules in place across the board, some of which affect your advertising on Facebook cost figures, and others that will hinder the promotional ideas you’re conceiving.
Learn the rules and regulations Facebook has in place and make sure you’re not stepping outside of them. A failure to adhere to the rules can have your promotion rendered null and void. Knowing that you can’t contact winners of a promotion through Facebook or that you’ll need a third-party app for using “likes” as an entry are important rules.
3: Select Your Prize
What exactly are you planning on giving away? A prize should be very appealing to the audience you’re after. Think about something that is a genuine prize.
Think about holding a contest rather than simply offering people a discount on a product or some “secret” information that they couldn’t have learned about otherwise. Movie tickets, free iTunes downloads, electronics, etc – these are all great prizes to consider to draw in big crowds.
4: Step Outside of Facebook
Facebook isn’t the only place you can advertise your promotion. Once you’ve checked up on the rules, conceived of your general idea and have a prize in place, it’s time to start thinking about how you’ll market this promotion.
You can use your blog, Twitter, YouTube, your main website, and dozens of other methods to draw traffic to your promotion. Just because you’re holding your promotion via your Facebook page doesn’t mean it has to be affiliated solely with Facebook. This is where a lot of people make a mistake. Advertise across the net.
5: Select the Right App
The only way to successfully carry out a Facebook promotion is to use a third-party app to build it. One of the best on the market to use is Wildfire. This will allow you to easily create a promotion by providing you with a lot of different templates and options to select from.
After you have everything situated and built, the only thing left to do is launch the promotion and catalog the contact information. Just remember that promotions can run as long as you want them to, but it’s better to instill a sense of urgency. Have all your steps in place before the final launch. Everything’s going to move quickly once it’s set up.
Author’s Bio:
Eric Taylor is a social media enthusiast, business developer and a freelance writer for Qwaya, a Facebook ad campaign tool that focuses on developing and building tools for social media marketing most specifically for Facebook. Qwaya also provides quality information, tools and up-to-date news and trends about Facebook marketing strategies. The company aims to create one of a kind tools with powerful features that are user-friendly and inexpensive for online advertisers and marketers world wide.