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 able 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 his customer base. The contest app will allow him to post it on Facebook, attach it to tweets, and make it easy for people to spread the word amongst their friends. The radio stations he is partnering with can add the app link to their sites for easy entry, as well as the TV station websites 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 allows people to spread the word through their social network, pass the link around, and ask them to vote; these are things much more easily done on social media or internet sites than 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, the stories begin. This is just another area where social media excels! Pictures on Facebook, the winning essay attached to tweets, updates on the winner’s experience during the season—these are 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 followers to your tweets, a massive residual moving forward with your marketing and social media endeavors that cannot be overlooked! The more businesses that move into Facebook, the more and more competition there is for people to “Like” them. Social media promotions give them a reason to join your community. With as affordable and straightforward as 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 as creating more bang for your buck?  The contest will run in August, and update how it went at the end of the month.