A2Z Computer Services Inc

Corporate I.T. Solutions, Computer Repair and Web Design in Henderson, KY

Facebook Contests: Do’s and Don’ts

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Facebook contests and giveaways are very popular these days. It’s rare to not see posts from friends who have just entered to win a gift card or an iPad. It’s just as rare to not see posts from company pages that you like promoting their latest sweepstakes and how you can win. Contests are a great way to generate buzz about your brand on the largest social network around. However, there are a few problems that many businesses run into when it comes to making Facebook contests a part of their social media strategy. Below is just the tip of the iceberg that I hope will create some conversation and get you thinking about the use of contests in  your social media strategy.

You are not allowed to run contests on the Facebook platform.

According to Facebook’s Promotional Guidelines, companies are not allowed to run contests or giveaways using the Facebook platform. This means that you can’t ask a question in a post and randomly pick a winner from the comment thread. You’re also not allowed to run a contest through voting in your photo albums. Essentially, if a tool or feature is native to Facebook you’re not allowed to use it for running your contest.

So what is the right way to run a contest? Third party applications. These applications integrate with Facebook but they are not part of Facebook, they are not running on Facebook’s servers. These applications allow you to run fan generated contests, sweepstakes and other types of promotions. This is the only way that Facebook allows you to run contests. Unfortunately, many either ignore this rule or simply don’t know it exists. You’re also not allowed to announce contest winners using the Facebook platform. Winners must be contacted in private through email, phone or some other method.

It’s important to run your contests the right way so that you won’t potentially lose all that you’ve worked for in building your Facebook presence.

The contest is over. Now what?

Picture this: Today is the big day. For the past month your company has been running and promoting a sweepstakes on your Facebook page to give away an excellent prize. You check your page insights and see that your interactions, impressions and new likes have skyrocketed over the last few weeks. You’ve managed to gain hundreds, maybe even thousands of new likes on the page. You’re ecstatic. All these new people have seen your logo and shown interest in your company (or at least the contest). You draw the winner, give them their prize and thank all the entrants for participating. You go home for the weekend and relax knowing that you have succeeded on Facebook. Monday morning comes and you sign into Facebook as soon as you sit down at your desk. You pull up your company page, click the text box to begin writing a post when you suddenly stop and think “What now?”

As I said before, running contests through Facebook is an excellent way to generate buzz, gain more likes and to simply show community appreciation. I also believe that these special promotions can be a part of everyone’s social media strategy in some form or fashion. However, contests cannot be your entire social media strategy. If you do nothing but continually run contests how will your business truly benefit? You may have 10,000 likes on your Facebook page or 10,000 followers on Twitter but are those individuals truly relevant to your business? You need to provide true value to your online community or else they will leave. If they don’t care about your products or service then they will probably leave as soon as the contest is over. Give your followers a reason to stick around, give something of value.

Your business needs a social media strategy that makes education and customer service a priority. Yes, you should grow your page as time goes on with various promotions. But the true value lies in the content that you’re putting out there and the conversation that takes place around your brand daily.

Our goal at A2Z is to help businesses use social media in a way that is effective in giving value to the online community, creating awareness about your products and services and bringing you more business. Contests help but they cannot do it all.

Are contests part of your social media strategy? Based on what you read above, are you running them the right way?

Three questions that must be asked when creating a social media strategy

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A couple weeks ago, we at A2Z Computer Services, Inc hosted a free seminar at our office for our existing Mad Skillz Marketing customers to help enhance their Social Media presence.  The purpose of this seminar was to show these business owners how to start their Social Media ventures with a strong foundation.  So we showed them how developing a business plan for Social Media that included various Goals, Strategies, and Schedules will help them fully benefit from Social Media.

You might be asking yourself “Really?  A business plan and strategies for using Facebook and Twitter??”

The simple answer is YES.

And to help you, we’ve developed a few questions you can ask yourself to help you get going with Marketing your business with Social Media:

What do I have to offer?
As business owners, we all have something to offer our customers that adds value to their lives, whether that value be our products and services or simply knowledge and information. If we didn’t, then we wouldn’t have been in business for very long.  Are you looking to offer people knowledge or information?  Or perhaps you’re providing them a way to save money with your products and services. Whatever the value-add is that you’re offering, keep it in mind as you develop your Social Media Goals and Strategies.

Who am I trying to reach?
This aspect of your Strategies and Goals will play an important part in your overall Social Media endeavor.  Everything from the content of your posts, to the manner in which you convey your ideas, to even the design and feel of your Social Media outlets, having an identified target audience is very important.  Identifying targeted customer age groups, geographic locations, interests, and other demographic information is vital to developing a solid campaign.

What do I want to accomplish?
This question may sound simple at first, but after much thought it can become difficult to define.  Are you looking for more visits to your website?  Do you want more customers coming to your store or restaurant?  Is finding an alternative means to communicating one on one with your customers your objective?  Finding out your purpose for using Social Media will bring your overall Strategies and Goals together and get you started on the path to using these marketing avenues effectively.

Now, as an example, after answering these questions, a restaurant can develop a Social Media campaign to draw more 18 – 30 year old college students in their doors to try their latest mouth watering appetizers and convince them to stick around for a wonderful week night dinner.

Finally, remember that Social Media is not a one way street.  If businesses are just constantly throwing information out there, hoping to get a few bites, they are really just settings themselves up for failure.  Goals and strategies will help guide a business to truly reap the rewards that Social Media has to offer.

If you have any further questions please comment below and join in the conversation. If you would like assistance with your Social Media Strategy, please feel free to contact A2Z Computer Services, Inc at (270) 830-9590 or send us a message via our contact page.

A Response on Beginning to Tweet

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Recently, a client asked us how they could get followers on Twitter. Being new to Twitter, they are of course excited to start using this great tool for their business to better connect with their customers and peers in their field, as well they should be enthusiastic about it. In an email, we replied to their question with a few tips and links to resources for beginners.

We decided to share our reply with you in hopes that you too can grow, add your style and needs to this, and pass it along to others as well. Enjoy!

RE: Twitter

I have a few tips and ideas for you on ways to accumulate more followers and connections on twitter, I also have a few links to online articles that I believe will be beneficial to you as well.

A few simple steps would be:

-Promote your twitter account via Facebook and your web site, add links to your Facebook page and twitter onto your site (your web host should be able to do this for you)

-Promote both Facebook and Twitter in your ads, marquee signs, business cards, etc.

-Put up a sign in your stores, perhaps next to your registers, informing customers to find you on Facebook and Twitter

-When someone “follows” you on Twitter, be sure to “follow” them back

-Be personable and natural

-Allow your followers list to grow naturally

-Don’t try to sell people something in all of your posts

Twitter involves a little more patience than Facebook as far as growth goes, it grows more naturally, but don’t be discouraged by this. Even if you only have two followers, treat it with the care that you would give to it if you only had 2,000 followers. Although there are some common courtesies involved with using Twitter, you have the freedom to morph this to fit your business and life. Therefore the more you use it and the more you observe on it, the easier it will become to think up strategies and set goals for your Twitter identity.

Here are a few links and articles that I think will really help you:

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/best_practices This will help you with some basic practices

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/learning This will help you understand and learn the lingo.

http://business.twitter.com/twitter101/case_bestbuy On the left hand side of this page you’ll see a list of other case studies to look at.

http://madskillzmarketing.wordpress.com This is our blog that we update regularly

http://deansguide.wordpress.com/2009/03/24/twitter-strategies-and-tips-for-beginning-twitterers/ This is a short article on beginning Twitter strategy

This should effectively get you going, just remember that although there are a few guidelines you’ll want to be aware of, Twitter is completely open and can be molded to fit your business needs.

Social Media will not help your business…

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…if you do not use it correctly.

Just like anything else we use everyday, we have have to know how to use it correctly. If we don’t use a gas pump correctly, it’s worthless. If you don’t use Social Media correctly it will not help your business, if anything it will cause you stress and irritation and drive to possibly even write off Social Networking altogether.

When I say “use it correctly” I don’t mean the technical side of it. It’s not hard to make a post, the challenge is figuring out the content that you need to put in your post. Sure, simply sending out a fact or piece of history of the the business everyday can be nice and cute, it can even work well for some people, but the point of Social Media is getting the word out about business, drawing more people in, and better connecting with your current customers, no matter how large or small that number is.

NOTE: This post will not give you a strategy to copy and follow, the purpose of this article is to make you think and create a proper mindset for using Social Media with your business.

Strategy and goal setting are very important aspects of any successful business. If you run a business, you understand the importance of planning things out and deciding how you’re going to take advantage of different tools to better grow your business…so why would not put that same care into creating a strategy and setting goals for your Social Media usage? Social Media has grown exponentially in the last few years, it’s not just for teenagers anymore (we’ve discussed this in other posts).

You have to get out of the mindset that this is just a cute, static tool.

Learning how to create a Social Media strategy can be done several ways, all of which are useful. You can of course hire a Social Media consultant to meet with you and assess your needs and help you set goals and plan things out. You might be saying to yourself “A consultant to tell me how to use facebook and twitter? Ridiculous.”, but you’re then getting someone to teach you how to use something that will forever be free, which is not a bad deal at all. Another way is to research stories of how other businesses have used Social Media to get ideas and get the creative process started. This is your network, this an opportunity to be completely creative, with very few guidelines. This is your business, your mind, your thoughts, anything goes. You can come up with with specials and coupons to create buzz, you can have have random drawings from your friends lists to give out prizes like a free meal. The sky is the limit, this thing has an endless amount of potential but is completely worthless is you don’t know how to effectively plan and run with it.