8 TIPS FOR RUNNING SOCIAL MEDIA PROMOTIONS TO ENSURE LEGAL COMPLIANCE, BUILD BUZZ AND ENCOURAGE UGC

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If you’re looking to gain even more traction with social promotions like contests and sweepstakes here are eight additional tips to enhance your next social media campaign courtesy of Ben Pickering, author of How to Run a Successful Social Media Contest. 

Ensure Your Promotion Doesn’t Get You In Hot Water

It’s difficult to run a successful campaign if your promotion is blocked, removed or challenged in a court of law. So before we get to the fun part of marketing, there are a few logistical tips to keep in mind.

#1: Running a Facebook Promotion Requires an App

Much has been written about the Facebook Promotional Guidelines and how to run a compliant promotion. The guidelines have evolved, but the most important requirement remains the same: any promotion (i.e., something where a consumer enters for a chance to win a prize) on Facebook must be handled through an app.

If you know what you’re doing, you could develop your own Facebook app, but you might prefer to personalize an “off-the-shelf” app by a variety of companies such as:

• North Social 
• Wildfire
• Strutta

Some are inexpensive and no-frills, while others provide a more robust set of features and options to connect you with your customers and personalize the experience.

If you choose a third-party app provider, choose a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer so you can feel confident you’re in compliance with Facebook’s platform policies.

Look for developers and platforms that display this badge with the Apps qualification.

#2: Twitter Promotions Must Provide Rules Disclosure

Any contest or sweepstakes must provide participants with terms and conditions of entry and Twitter is no exception. With only 140 characters to work with, this becomes one of the bigger challenges of running a Twitter-based promotion.

The easiest way to address this is to host the rules on a separate web page and include a short link when tweeting about the contest. Alternatively you can host a landing page with all of the contest details and requirements and direct traffic to that page, rather than having the interaction take place within the Twitter stream.

For larger-scale promotions, you may wish to utilize a third-party service such as CMP.LY to ensure compliance.

In this example, the CMP.LY service is used to provide a short URL linking to the terms of the promotion whenever it is shared on Twitter.

#3: Beware of the Lottery

No, I’m not worried about you blowing your paycheck on Powerball. But lotteries are the domain of the government and you want to ensure your promotion isn’t deemed an illegal lottery.

Any promotion that contains the following THREE elements is considered a lottery: 

• prize 
• element of chance in winner selection 
• consideration (cash payment, purchase requirement or extensive effort required to enter)

Since you wouldn’t have much of a promotion without a prize, you must eliminate either chance or consideration (or best of all, both) to steer clear of potential legal concerns.

Tips to Build Buzz

Once you’ve dotted your I’s and crossed your T’s on the legal and policy side, it’s time to think about how to drive traffic and build momentum for your promotion.

#4: Make it Easy for Users to Share

This is the most important tip when it comes to marketing. Much of the value in a social promotion comes from the increased ease for participants to share your promotion through their social graph.

One of the reasons contests such as “Retweet to Win” are so popular is the nearly frictionless sharing. If you’re using an app on Facebook to encourage viral sharing, ensure that the sharing options are easy and intuitive.

However, it’s also important to be aware that over-sharing can lead to the perception of spam, so it’s important to strike the right balance.

Note: It’s against Facebook policy to directly reward a user for sharing. You may use Facebook apps to reward referrals, but be careful not to directly incentivize sharing.

Integrated share tools make it easy for contest participants to share if they want to.

#5: Regularly Promote Your Contest

Contest organizers will often schedule a bunch of communications when a promotion launches, then fail to maintain communication throughout the campaign.

Be sure to share key milestones and events (e.g., contest round ending, finalists being selected, just reached 100 or 10,000 entries).

If you’re running a user-generated content promotion, it’s also a great opportunity to share content (e.g., popular or unique entries) that will drive greater engagement.

When posting about your promotion on Facebook, be sure to utilize the pinned post feature to keep the post visible at the top of the timeline.

And don’t forget to utilize all of your social channels—it’s OK to promote your Facebook contest on Twitter and Google+.

In this example, a compelling image is used to draw attention and a direct link to the contest app is provided.

#6: Amplify Your Message Through Partners

Tap into the power of partner marketing by including sponsors and providing them with exposure in exchange for cross-promotion.

Also be sure to identify influencers (journalists, bloggers, etc.) whom you canreach out to and share news about your promotion.

If you’re running a contest with a judging component to evaluate entries, you may want to invite influencers to be a part of the judging panel. Attaching their name to your contest adds credibility and gives them a good reason to talk about it!

PR firm Affect tapped influential people in the PR and marketing world to serve as judges and help them find the ultimate summer intern.

Tips for Contests Featuring User-Generated Content

I am a big believer in the power of user-generated content promotions, but having been involved with many over the past five years, there are a couple of key lessons I’ve learned.

#7: Prime the Pump

Any time you’re asking users to submit content into a promotion, it’s a good idea to seed the contest with a few submissions.

These can be sample entries that you create which are not eligible to win or submissions from participants who have been encouraged to enter early.

In this contest run by Social Media Examiner's own Mike Stelzner, Mike provided his own sample entry to help inspire participants.

The key is to have some entries right away to break the ice and provide others with inspiration for their own submission.

#8: Think Twice Before Relying Solely on the Court of Public Opinion

Contests featuring user-generated content often incorporate a component of public voting. This is something I would encourage because it drives greater virality, with participants naturally incentivized to share their entries and voters taking an active role in the outcome.

However, if your contest is decided 100% by public voting, you need to be prepared to relinquish control of the outcome to those individuals with the largest social networks and/or those using vote-swapping and other tricks to try to game the system.

The most popular contest model among our clients uses a round of voting to narrow the field of entries down to a predetermined number of finalists, and a panel of judges then decides the winner.

By employing a set of predefined judging criteria, the client is able to retain some discretion over who is named the winner(s) while still generating a lot of voting and sharing activity up front.

Another option is to use judging criteria to select finalists and then open it to voting. Regardless of your preferred contest model, ensure that your platform of choice is well-equipped to handle voting and the potential challenges that come along with it.

A Success Story

Recently Mari Smith launched her very first contest. Mari wanted to do something fun and rewarding for her fans, and to introduce a new webinar she was hosting. She was consistently enthusiastic about delivering a great experience for her community and utilized many of the tips outlined above.

Mari did a great job of promoting the contest and keeping fans engaged by profiling interesting segments along the way.

Mari invited everyone to submit their Facebook cover photo for a chance to win a Facebook Makeover valued at $1,000. In just three weeks, the promotion received nearly 400 entries, which in turn generated 1,500 shares and more than 3,000 click-throughs.

An additional 2,000 people subsequently participated as entrants or voters as a direct result of another entrant sharing the promotion with them.

The contest received more than 25,000 visits in just three weeks, providing great exposure for Mari and generating a significant number of signups to her webinar.

I’ve seen companies of all sizes use promotions in a similar fashion to inexpensivelyacquire and engage fans, build awareness for a new product and ultimately drive conversions to sales.

What do you think? What would you like a social promotion to do for you?Please join in the discussion below.

COMMENTARY:    Here are 7 simple steps to launching a successful social media promotion by Dave Kerpen, CEO, Likeable Media in an article that appeared in All Things WOM:

1. Build a community first. Too often, companies think that if they create an exciting contest or sweepstakes, it’ll “go viral” and bring them lots of Facebook fans or Twitter followers. That may happen, but you’re much more likely to succeed with your social media promotion if you already have an established Facebook or Twitter and blog community.
2. Define your goal carefully. Are you looking for increased targeted likes? Website traffic? Leads? Buzz? Sales? Your goal will inform what kind of promotion you put together, the budget and length of the promotion, and success metrics.
3. Create a simple experience. Elaborate contests can be fun to envision, but too often are complex and ask too much of consumers to enter. It’s a lot to ask people to create videos, for instance, but easier to ask them to upload photos and even easier to ask them to answer a question.
4. Understand the laws of the land. When you run a contest or sweepstakes, you have to make sure the t’s are crossed and i’s dotted in your rules. In social media, it’s even more complicated, as Facebook has its own set of ever-changing Promotions Guidelines to plan around.
5. Choose a great tool to help you. Two of the best-known social media promotions tools are WildfireApp and Strutta, but there are lots of social media promo companies worth looking at. When setting up your promotion, keep in mind not only how easy it is to enter, but also how easy and compelling it is to share across social networks.
6. Include a social network media budget to support the promotion. You wouldn’t host an offline sweepstakes without a media budget to support it, so don’t expect to host an online promo without an advertising budget. Ideally, the media should be spent on the social platform where the promotion resides. So if it’s on Facebook, run Facebook ads. On Twitter, run Promoted Tweets.
7. Track results and iterate for the future. Unlike offline promotions, which may take a year to plan and execute, social media promotions can be planned and executed a lot faster, giving you more time to look at the results and make changes for the near future. Whatever success looks like to your brand, it can always be better, so the more you track, the more you can analyze and improve.

Above all else, take off your marketing cap, put on your consumer cap, and ask yourself, “Would I be excited to enter this contest and tell all of my friends about it? Is this easy enough to enter? Is the prize right?” If the answers to these questions are all “YES”, you’re well on your way to launching a successful social media promotion.

Want to know how the pro's design winning sales promotions? Check out social media expert Jeff Bullas' Top 10 Best Facebook Campaigns for 2010.

Courtesy of an article dated June 28, 2012 appearing in Social Media Examiner and an article dated June 21, 2011 appearing in AllThingsWOM and an article dated March 1, 2011 appearing in Jeff Bullas blog

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