Modern Insider » contest

Despite that fact that just about everyone who could legitimately be called a social media expert has stated their opposition to using fan numbers as the primary basis for measuring social campaigns, fans / followers / likes have essentially turned into the De facto standard. In part this is our own doing – we [social practitioners] cited our fan growth, threw it into reports, and made it the headline at the annual review. We set the stage but now rather than expanding out, it’s what can we do to get this one little number up – enter the gimmick.

Like fan counts, the contest, the charity donation for every follower, the freebie for a like, all were at one point novel ideas so when we first did them it wasn’t a bad idea, we weren’t trying to reach the world, we were trying to get people who had never “faned” a brand to do so, to get our existing base to recognize that we were on this new medium so we ignored their wants and expectations in order to just get in front. But now it’s the everyday: a SoCal billboard from a company I’ve never heard of promises $25 to an organization for my Facebook click. Their name isn’t Coke or McDonalds, is the entire world really appropriate to be targeting to become a fan?

It’s time for that to all stop. Not to stop running programs but to stop running them for the sake of picking up whomever we can. It doesn’t make any sense.

Whether the platform calls it a like, a follower, a connection, a circle member or whatever what we’re talking about is brand fans, people who we can hopefully connect with around what we sell, who may share a post, who want to comment back and give us an insight and that requires a mutual relationship – they have to be interested, we have to know why they are.

With a gimmick we know exactly why the person’s following but yet we pretend that’s not it. We pretend that everyone is ready to connect with our brand and just needed a push to make it happen. So we tell the tell the team we’ve added 200,000 people this quarter who want to engage with us and meanwhile our comments all start to read “first to post” or “give more stuff away”. They’re engaging all right, just not with what we offer.

Social as a tactic is young and there’s certainly going to me times where we decide to do something to get seen but we have to remember why we’re doing this – to connect, to be a part of the conversation, to get a chance to talk to our customer. So when we read that most brands can’t beat 1% engagement rates, can’t find the “ROI” [I’ll save that for another day] the first issue we should be thinking about is who we’re even bringing in to talk to that would make those numbers change.

Study social users and you’ll immediately find that what they’re looking to be engaged with through interesting content, events, photos and yes, contests. Contesting has long been used by brands looking to participate in user based communities as it offers a simple way to build discussion and potentially even capture customer data.

Of course with thousands of brands competing for the attention of the hundreds of millions of social users it’s easy to get lost in the dust, or even worse, turn a good program into a disaster with a logistical problem. So before you start in on a contest of your own here are 5 tips to get you going in the right direction.

1. Contest frequency is as important as prize value.

While users love the big prizes these are your fans and they want to participate. Brands that understand this successfully capture a lot of attention and day to day growth by giving away something here and there rather than waiting months to do all inclusive, super expensive giveaways.

Alternate between the big giveaways and the simple ones. Depending on your brand a t-shirt can get nearly as much response as a premium product. And the more often you give, the more people look.

In the example above Hot Topic drives great fan response and keeps people logged in by handing out movie tickets and other small ticket items one at a time, randomly.

2. Keep your contest on facebook, use apps to extend it.

While it’s easy, and generally a good idea, to do a simple video, photo or even “like” contest you want people giving something back to you and you don’t want to force them to leave your page to do so (that would reduce the interest and buzz). Whether it’s a few pieces of data, a survey response or virally spreading the giveaway, the basic contests are limited and you have to go jump outside the box to get richer tools.

Wildfire is one of the more popular apps offering a variety of features from basic data capture through to a fully co-branded sharable experience. This comes at a cost but if you’re expecting a larger response you want the email optins, the fans, the branding space.

Just don’t try to force people through long forms or to share the contest, never works in the long term.

3. Spell out all the details in your head & then to the user.

Individually people tend to be forgiving but in mass they can be easily upset and downright underhanded. You want your contest to be airtight so everyone has a good experience… fans take these things very seriously and confusion leads to disgruntled response, emails and other unneeded negatives. Keep it all positive and airtight so no one feels cheated in the end…

To be sure you’re got think your contest through at length yourself and then share it with a half dozen co-workers to see what they think.

Is it easy to enter? If so, is it easy to game?
Is there a way to figure out who entered? If not how will you get an answer?
Do people know who can enter and who cant?
Are the rules easily found to clarify things? Are they broad enough to cover an issue? Fraud? Cheating?
Do you have a way to contact the winner? That is an important one.

4. Take advantage of profile targeting & avoid upset users.

Since contests are rarely open to, or intended for everyone when it comes to ads or a post to your wall this feature is truly invaluable in facebook contests.

Use profile targeting (country / demographics) wisely and you can minimize upset fans who are not able to enter. This becomes essential as your page grows from country specific to global and fans feel left out.

You can also accelerate your growth finding well suited users and driving them over to your page. And since you’re fan page is where the contest takes place people can fan you in the same ad – double win.

5. Don’t “set it and forget it”

Your first few contests will have hiccups and users always have issues. Don’t leave your fans hanging and guessing… jump in and help. This not only solves problems but enables user to user assistance as fans find a solution and share it with others. There’s nothing worse than turning your computer on after a long weekend to discover the great promotion you did failed. Your users will be on 24×7, don’t forget that.

And remember to always K.I.S.S. (Keep it simple, stupid). Just like no one reads an entire web pages, users get bored with long posts, want to find a simple method and want a simple answer.

This is the golden rule of just about anything in social but even more so in contests. People’s attention spans online are short, as is their willingness to put up with barriers or issues. When you want to get people involved you want to get a lot involved and the easier it is for everyone to participate the more will.

As a final suggestion, never forget about the wall – that’s the most valuable real estate in social marketing and where you should be aiming to get. So in every giveaway be sure you’re aware of how your promo can, or can’t get you in that space.