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Social Media Gets the Word Out (Fast!) About Promotions 

 

The buzz about social media has grown exponentially, and it's clear that this trend is here to stay. Anyone and everyone seems to have a Facebook page these days, from your colleague in the next cubicle to your grandma who just bought her first computer last year. Sites like Facebook, as well as Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Bebo and others, are making headlines and attracting millions of new users daily. But in today's climate of segmented and targeted messaging, how exactly can social media benefit your clients?

 

Social media tools offer exciting new ways for agencies and brand managers to reach out directly to brand advocates and to potential consumers. Facebook alone boasts more than 250 million active users who regularly sign on to share updates, post links and become fans of their favorite bands and brands. Create a Facebook fan page for a product or brand and you enlist brand evangelists to do the heavy lifting for you. On Twitter it's even easier: Set up a Twitter account for a brand or promotion and send Tweets-140-character, or shorter, updates-to all your followers. Other Twitter users can then re-Tweet, or pass on, the message for you, and it's easy to track who's talking (or posting) about your client.

 

"Social media provides brands an opportunity to not only see the conversations that are going on about their products but also actively engage in the conversations," says Barbara Maldonado, Business Development Manager at Marketing Resources, Inc. "These sites give agencies an opportunity to listen to real conversations outside the blog space-for a marketer, you can trend real-time conversations, follow influencers and do mini-focus groups whenever you want because you can just post something to your followers and have people respond to that."

How MRI Is Tapping Into Social Media

 

So how can MRI help you reach out to customers? We're blazing a new trail and harnessing the power of social media to create buzz-worthy games, contests and sweepstakes for our clients. "We've figured it out," Maldonado explains. MRI's programs reach a client's target audience and "find out who's following, who's talking about it and who's re-Tweeting it."

 

One exciting new promotional tool we've developed is a proprietary sweepstakes application for Facebook called Go Sweeps. The application, or "app," lives on the brand's fan page or on a special page created just for the promotion. Then it runs like any other promotion-MRI administers the sweepstakes by collecting the entries and gathering data about the registrants. The only difference is that it's easier to implement and generates more immediate results. And MRI is the only promotional marketing services company with an approved Facebook app for sweepstakes, so with us you'll hit the ground running.

 

Another Facebook-approved app we've created is an online survey tool called Survey Sez! After a thorough discussion of our client's goals, we create the right type of survey to elicit the information you need. Then we collect the resulting data and generate reports in an easy-to-use format.

 

We're also proud of another recent accomplishment: a Tweetstakes, or sweepstakes powered by Twitter. In order to launch its latest smart phone, the Matrix Pro, Pantech wanted to create a promotion that reflected the device's high-tech features. Their agency contacted us to help develop a sweepstakes using Twitter-one of the first-ever Tweetstakes. Every day throughout the promotion, consumers visited a dedicated website to register and enter, or answered a "question of the day" from their Twitter account. Each time they answered the question, they became eligible for both the daily prize and the grand prize sweepstakes. The prize pool for the Tweetstakes and instant win game totaled more than $45,000 and included a $25,000 grand prize.

 

The results surpassed our expectations: Nearly 5,000 people registered to play, resulting in more than 26,000 entries over the course of the three-and-a-half-month promotion period. Pantech saw an almost 2 percent conversion rate from unique website visitors to friends or followers on Facebook and Twitter.

 

Social media contests and sweepstakes are well suited to today's segmented and targeted approach to marketing, and they are more far-reaching than traditional promotions because of their "ripple effect," says Maldonado. "It's not just a banner ad. You're targeting people who are going to post it and follow it. It's truly authentic. Now impressions go even further, and you're really getting into the social fabric of conversations and updates of what people are doing every day."