Using Social Media Apps with Promotions

We’re rolling out social media promotions for a local client of ours.  The business will be giving away a pair of season tickets to the Oregon Ducks 2010 Football season.  A hot ticket!  The Ducks went to the Rose Bowl last year and had been picked to win the Pac-10 again.  The Ducks have sold out 71 straight games, a streak dating back to 1999.  So it should be a no-brainer.  The business owner originally had thought about just going old school, having the cluster of 5 radio stations including the flagship station of the Ducks promote an enter to win essay contest.  While radio will do a good job promoting it to their listeners a lot of us are just not enter to win on-premise kind of people, and a large part of doing this or any promotion is to get new people involved with who and what you are all about!

By adding a contest app to the social media promotions, he can reach far more individuals outside of his customer base.  The contest app will allow him to post it on Facebook, to attach it to tweets and making it easy for people to spread the word amongst their friends.  The radio stations that he is partnering with can add the app link to their sites for easy entering as well as the TV station websites that he advertises on.  Having done a couple of social media promotions with apps before it’s not necessarily the entering aspect that creates the most attention, it’s the voting process.  The contest app gives people the opportunity to spread the word through their social network and pass the link around and asks them to vote; these are things much more easily done on social media or internet sites than they are on the airwaves. While all this is going on, it’s his name that is out there first and foremost; it’s his name associated with the giveaway, and it’s his name that gets the goodwill points by doing what he’s doing.

When the social media promotion is over, that is when the stories begin.  This is just another area where social media excels!  Pictures on Facebook, the winning essay attached to tweets, updates on the experience the winner has during the season, things that can easily be done on social media at no cost.

Adding a social media promotions contest app to your promotional mix will also add significant numbers to your Facebook “Like” page and add followers to your tweets, a massive residual moving forward with your marketing and social media endeavors that cannot be overlooked!  The more and more businesses that move into Facebook, the more and more there is competition for people to “Like” them.  Social media promotions gives them a reason to join your community.

With as affordable and straightforward that contests apps are, I don’t know how or why as a business owner you would overlook using them with any promotion that you are going to be doing that involves traditional media.  In a time where most retail business owners are looking for a little more bang, how can you not look at this for creating more bang for your buck!  The contest will run during the month of August and will update how it went at the end of the month.