4 Ways to Get Your Social Promotions Noticed on Facebook

Posted by Chris Formosa

According to Pew Research Center’s latest social media statistics, Facebook remains the most popular social media platform despite an insurgence of newcomers to the social media realm. Beating out Twitter, Pinterest, and LinkedIn, Facebook receives the most use from adults ages 18 – 49 and can be a powerful promotional tool if used wisely. In this article, you’ll learn how to develop social sweepstakes, contests, and promotions that gain the attention of followers and encourage sharing.

How to Make Your Social Promotions Stand Out

As a brand marketer, it’s tough to get noticed on Facebook. Between navigating the platform’s ever-changing news feed updates and maintaining a dialogue with followers, the task of optimizing social promotions can be daunting. Incorporate the following strategies into your social contests strategy to achieve better results.

1) Cross Promote

While it might be the starting point for your contests’ distribution, published Facebook content needs to travel to truly be successful. Help your social contests get noticed by cross-promoting your posts on other social media sites. Which site you choose will largely depend on your target audience. For example, Twitter is among the best platforms for reaching young college graduates while Pinterest’s user base is dominated by upper middle class women, according to Pew Research Center. Additionally, it is always beneficial to ask your partners and network to share the promotion on their social channels in exchange for some social sharing in return.

2) Focus on Participation

One way to improve social contest participation is to develop a campaign that asks for user-generated content. Whether a contest requires participants to submit a photo, make a craft, or become a panel judge, promotions that get viewers involved receive the most attention.

3) Engage with Content

On the web, in the car, and at the movies, consumers are bombarded with brand advertisements and messaging. To truly stand out and make an impact, your brand’s social promotions need to be unique and engaging. Both Facebook and Twitter support visual content, and researchers are finding a strong link between the use of visual content and viewer engagement. Posts with photos receive the most shares on Facebook and retweets on Twitter when compared to other forms of content. Entertain viewers with humour, sharing incentives, and incorporate visual content, like photos or video, to inspire viewers to participate. Adding a voting component to your contests is also an excellent way to get participants spread the word by sharing their entry with friends and family, in hopes to collect the most votes.

4) Monitor Campaign Performance

If you’re a marketer after my own heart, you love data. An effective way to improve upon your social promotions strategy is to do more of what works and less of what doesn’t. The only way to identify which campaigns were most successful is to review performance metrics.

  • How many people did your post reach, and on which platforms?
  • On which platform was my promotion shared the most?
  • On which platform did viewers take the most action?
  • Which participants shared the most and referred the most friends to the contest?
  • Were you surprised by who did and didn’t respond to your posts or share your promotion?
  • Even if your campaign goals weren’t met, does the data indicate potential reasons why?

Monitoring the performance of each post and its contribution to campaign goals provides valuable insight that can innovate future messaging and campaigns.

Master Social Media Contests

With nearly 1.5 billion users, Facebook can be a game changer for brands of any size. It’s no wonder that Facebook is given priority when fleshing out marketing strategies. Keep these tips in mind when developing your promotion and planning to increase social visibility and attract more leads.

What struggles do you face when promoting social contests? Share your experiences in the comments section.