There is a lot of buzz out there about Facebook and why you may (or may not) want to invest time and money in building and activating your fan base. Whether you drink the social media kool-aid or not, if you are a business and your customers are humans, then odds are that most of your customers are spending copious amounts of time in Facebook. There are roughly 150M active Facebook users in the US and they are spending a lot of time there.
One thing we’ve got here at DigitalSherpa is data, tons of data about internet and social media marketing for small businesses, including blogs and social media profiles and how their viewers consume them. With that in mind, I’m staring a monthly series where we’ll dive into some of those numbers and talk about results we see with our unique perspective, having visibility into the results of our 1,500+ customers.
In this month’s installment, we’ll explore how Facebook campaigns helped some of our clients build their fans and followers. For more information on why you want to build your followers, check out this post: Facebook Campagins: A New Way to Engage Prospects.
Here at DigitalSherpa our core services have historically been content marketing including the design, development and hosting of blogs, creation and linking to social media profiles, and the ongoing creation of fresh, relevant and unique content for our customers. A few months ago we expanded our services to include the creation and management of Facebook Campaigns using tools created by Wildfire.
There are many types of campaigns you can run using Wildfire’s tools, we are going to look at the two most common types our clients have chosen to date: Sweepstakes and Photo contests. I will further breakdown sweepstakes into two categories, those which are open to everyone to enter, and those which have limitations on eligibility for entry, for example requiring entrants to live in a certain location, attend a specific event or similar. Below are some things we have learned:
1. Running a Facebook Campaign will grow your fan base
No matter what type of campaign your run, you will grow your number of followers. Our clients have on average grown their fan base by 251% or more than 15 fans for each day the contest is run.
2. Unrestricted Sweepstakes are the best way to grow your fan base
When you break it down by type you see that while the average fan growth was 251%, unrestricted sweepstakes experienced a growth of 863%. Restricted sweepstakes experienced a 265% increase while photo contests have seen growth of closer to 120%.
3. Know your audience
Facebook users love technology! Prizes for things like iPads, Nooks and Kindles have seen average growth of 1380% in their fan counts. At the same time, if you know your audience you can still experience tremendous growth with other types of prizes. For example, one of our clients involved in the home design industry gave away a rug valued at $1,000 and experienced over 1500% growth in fans.
4. Photo contests are a great way to engage your existing followers
In reading these numbers, you may wonder why anyone would ever want to do anything but an unrestricted sweepstakes. And I would agree if your main goal is growing your fans and followers. But once you’ve invested in growing your followers, it pays to engage them and this is where Photo Contests come into play. Our clients have seen an average of a 61% % increase in page activity and 72% increase in post feedback during their contest periods.
Want to learn more about Facebook campaigns? Be sure to attend our webinar next Tuesday, November 22, 2011 at 4 PM ET explaining how to grow and activate your Facebook fan base. If you can’t make that, then Contact Us and we’ll be happy to answer your questions.
I’d love to hear your experience with Facebook campaigns, leave your questions or share your experiences in the comments section. Also, if you have ideas for future installments of this series, feel free to put that in the comments section as well.
About Melissa O'Keefe
Great post Melissa.