Proven steps for running a successful Facebook contest

People love Facebook because this platform often could give us an opportunity to take part in any contest. You can win something huge for yourself or for your friends. It could be anything – from t-shirt with your favorite movie hero to a ticket to the football match of your dream. However, have you ever wondered how people could run successful Facebook contest and earn from this? We`ve seen lots of questions on this topic, so now it`s time to tell you how to run a Facebook contest.

Set goals and targets for the participants

If you think that running a contest is just to pick the prize and choosing a random winner, you are not right. Every giveaway, contest or other kind of such activity has a huge piece of work inside. You need to choose the main target of your contest. Here we have some huge targets that you could follow while running a Facebook contest:

• Increasing your audience on Facebook
• User generated content
• More commercial deals from other developers
• Fast sales right from the page
• Higher brand awareness

The perspective is very good, so you should start working if you want to get a result from such activity.

Fix your target market. Orientate on it during your work

You can`t just sit down and create a contest for all Facebook users in the world. You need to know your target market before you start doing something. How to do this? First of all, choose your sphere of work (business, sport, different services etc.). You will work in this sphere for the whole time. If there won`t be any result, you can change the vector.

Second, you must analyze your audience. Who will be interested in your marketing contest? How old these people could be? What they are interested in? you need to find answers to all these questions and then start doing the job.

Select type of your contest. Choose the best one

There are many kinds of contests in every social media. However, if we are talking about Facebook, there are some good variants for you.

Photo contest

The source of traffic for you and your business in the social media. People will generate content to get the prize and you will get:

• Subscribers
• Clients
• Sales and income

However, don`t choose one winner. If you see that users are very active, you can set a vote for a second winner (many developers are doing such things very often)

Sweepstakes

Great variant for you and your subscribers. People could easy take part in such competition. If your audience enjoy such entertainment, you can make such contests regular – once per month or per week.

Choose the optimal prize and budget of your project

If you know something about how to run a marketing contest, you should remember about this key point. The main orienteer for you will be your audience, because everything depends on the number of subscribers. There is no sense to run a contest for a very expensive laptop if you have less than 1000 subscribers.

If you are a beginner, start with something cheap. You will gain new subscribers and authority on the market. With the time you will be able to play serious.

Pay attention to the time limit. Your contest shouldn`t be too long.

In most cases, developers run Facebook contests for a week or ten days, not longer. Why? Because people will lose their interest and ambitions to win the competition. Yes, maybe you will get more subscribers because of the longer period, but it won`t be profitable for you in the perspective. Subscribers want to see regular activity from popular users, so it will be better to make short regular contests than one big.

If you are a beginner in this sphere, you should create a schedule.

Conclusion

So, that is it. We`ve tried our best to give you best advices of running a successful contest on Facebook. Hope you will use it during your working process.

Marketing on Facebook: How it changed?

Technologies are upgrading really fast. Sometimes we can`t even fixate one change when another one comes in. To be honest, it`s good when you get new possibilities, especially for social media. You see new functions and think about all possible ways of using them.

However, people use Facebook not only for chatting or reading posts. Persons who are using this platform for marketing know that if there are any changes that could help them, they will use it. Easy? Of course! However, Facebook marketing isn`t simple, and we need to look through all basic changes and analyze them.

Facebook stories

Some social media users have probably heard about stories earlier, on Instagram. These stories give you an ability to record short videos (only 15 seconds) or make photos on your smartphone and post it immediately. Moreover, you are able to add some filters to your materials to make them look better. Every single story is available for users during 24 hours.

With time, these stories came to Facebook in the same form – videos or photos with special effects in the platform. However, developers didn`t want to stop at this point. They created different applications for these stories. For stories, Carl! With it`s help you are able to mix your videos and photos, create a collage or something like that.

How to use Facebook stories in marketing?

It`s good, but very simple question. Let`s imagine that you have a group for your business (for example, food delivery). You can record videos about sorts of food that are available at your shop, make announcements about sales or giveaways or even for advertisements from other companies (by the way, it`s also the source of income).

It`s much easier for people to watch stories from your business account (if needed, you can add text there) than go on the main page and read huge text. You can save your time and create many stories about different things, but the result will be the same.

Another good thing is that you can get feedback from the customers. How? They can write answers to your stories showing their own opinion about your work.

Each story has extra statistic about itself: the number of persons who watched it and the number of “skips” (when person didn`t watch the full video and turned the page to another story). Statistic is also important if you pay attention to marketing on Facebook.

Facebook live streaming

This platform suddenly appears into the net and gives everyone an opportunity to make live broadcast from every point on the planet Earth where you have access to the Internet.

How can we combine live streaming and marketing? Easy! For example, you can use it for promotion of your services. These could be a long video (much longer than Facebook story). With the number of extra settings, you are able to create informative and well-designed video that will have thousands of viewers, likes and comments. Your audience will know that you can use different ways of communication with them.

Facebook Watch

On August 30, 2018 all Facebook users got their access to the platform called Facebook Watch. In fact, the bigger part of content on this service contains advertisements from TV channels and companies, which have young audience from 18 to 37 years old.

The main recommendation from Facebook is to publish long and thematical videos or live broadcasts from the events. I think that we can adapt this platform for our Facebook marketing. How can we do it? The algorithm is simple: you create a video about you and your business to attract customers. You can talk about your services (what customers can do, how should they use these services, what is the price, how to purchase it etc.). there are no limits for you, and you can record two or three parts of your monolog. Someone said that it looks similar to Twitch, but Twitch is more attractive, while Facebook Watch is adapted for business, what is good for us!

Facebook Watch could work on browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox or Opera.

Get feedback immediately!

Another good option, which is available for users – they can show their reaction during the video. But wait, why it`s good only for users? If developers see that people enjoy the stuff he is doing, it`s great!

Every person will see recommendations from Facebook Watch in his/her newsfeed every day. The recommendations will depend on the user`s interests, so people who are interested in the same sphere as you will see your videos.

Use “Pay to Play”

Even if you didn`t hear about such thing, you should try it. Maybe, you will enjoy it. Pay to play is one of the coolest ways to grow your business and it is more profitable than advertising campaigns or promotion out of the social media.

How to work with Pay to Play?

First, you should pick up an advertising object. To drive more traffic to your business page on Facebook, you need to choose Traffic.

Second, choose the audience location. Don`t go too far, later you will be able to change settings.

Third, choose the audience specific. It could be a current group of people or persons of one age.

Your fourth step is to choose a budget per one day and per week

Final step is to create an advertisement image that will appear on customer`s newsfeed every time they see your Pay to Play campaign. The easiest way to create an image is to use Google Drawing. The final product will be beautiful and simple.

To start working with this feature you just need to publish it on the newsfeed and it will start working.

However, remember – this is the simplest way to create Pay to Play. If you want to go further and get better result, you should learn more about it.

Resume

To sum up all that was said before, we can say Facebook platform had many changes. Of course, a bigger part of it was to attract users, make them use Facebook again and again. However, Facebook marketing also get it`s bonuses from these changes. We showed you how to adapt resent changes to your business and how to get positive result from it. Hope you`ll use our recommendation while working. Good luck!

How to use visual content in your social media strategy? The smartest ways.

Over time, people realized that they could grow their business with the help of social media. They use different methods called social media strategies to draw user`s attention and gain more views and visits.

However, if we are talking about popular social media like Facebook or Instagram, we need to realize that people don`t want to read long articles, analyze it and find important information. Everything is turning into visual content. Why? Partly because creators don`t want to spend their time writing texts about their product, but the main reason is that visual content is more susceptible for users in social media. If you read a long article with 500 or more words, you will probably forget a bigger part of it. So, the visual content gives us more impact then text. But how can we use it? Here we have some good examples.

Use different kinds of content. Mix them

You should understand that part of the Internet users probably doesn’t know all aspects of your business, so they could miss something. To avoid problematical situations, you need to begin with the educational content. At this part you show customers what you are doing and what they can do with your goods or services. Regular users will probably skip this block of information, but beginners will need it.

Then, you should add some entertaining content. Seriously, we are not laws and we are not talking about huge problems. Our task is to give people things they need. Entertaining social media visual content will attract customers, and they will pay attention to your work. However, don`t turn it to a circus.

Finally, give your audience a part of utility content. With it, they will know how to make the right decision.

Use infographics, not only images

Infographic is probably the most informational part of visual content. Formally, it`s a picture with different graphics and small descriptions (from 5 to 8 words). When people see something like that, they understand where is the key information and what they should remember.

However, you need to create or pick up the right infographic that belongs to your topic.

Post video messages

Someone may say that people don`t have time to watch videos. Ok, it`s true, but we don`t want them to watch. They should just listen. You can make your video material like an audio message with some images on the background. If person wants to watch, he/she can do it, but if it`s more comfortable to listen, this option is also available.

That is it! We showed you core points of the visual content and told you how it could be used in social media marketing. Each method works well, so you will se the result very quickly. Good luck!

How to use Twitter to grow up your small business? Best examples and recommendations.

If we will look on the most popular social media right now, we will see that developers and businesspersons are using them to promote their business. And it`s very smart because they could do it for free to get quick result.

We saw many good examples of such promotions on Instagram, where people show their goods in stories, make videos in IGTV and post images to attract customers. However, right now we are talking about other famous social media called Twitter. Someone could say that it`s less profitable than Instagram or Facebook but in fact you can use every social media for business promotion.

Beginners often came to the social media and want to have an army of clients who will buy their product. However, you couldn`t achieve success from the first day. To make people come to you the main thing you should do is to improve your social media page, generate good content and be active. Always. Here we will show you basic principles that will help you to grow up your small business in Twitter.

Keep an eye on the competitors.

If we are talking about any form of business, we must admit that every person who will start working in any sphere will have rivals and face difficulties. In our time every sphere of life that could give people regular services was studied by someone, so you`ll always have contestants near you.

However, everything isn`t so bad. If they are working with Twitter for a long time, you can use their experience as your main advantage. Here we have some examples of how you can do it:

• Monitor their audience. This person can work with your potential clients, so you should pay attention to it. Look who is the most active subscriber (likes, retweets) and who is always passive only scrolling down the tweets. It may help you to understand what people are interested in and what they don`t like. With this information you will have an ability to upgrade your profile.
• Look what content they use. Of course, it depends on the kind of business, but we know that there couldn`t be long articles or descriptions. Very often people put images, videos or link with a short description to share their business page or show people what they can do with it.

Create a valuable Twitter page

Maybe you think that this is a very simple point and everyone knows it, but we must say about it because it helps you in growing your business. You must show your customers that you have very serious approach to your business. Add images that will show how your business looks like (if it`s food delivery, you can add small photo with your logo and a bigger one with some of your food) and write a small description to attract customers. Also add your slogan, and clients will definitely remember your brand for a long time. Believe us, it works.

Don`t forget about hashtags

If we are talking about any form of advertising in Twitter, we must mention hashtags, because they are our main weapon in social media promotion. However, beginners could face some problems while working with hashtags. Why? Because you have only 140 symbols, so you should put the right tag in your post. Remember that people enjoy searching by hashtags, so you can use different combinations, add dates (years, months) and use abbreviations.

You can also analyze Twitter and look what hashtags people could use to search your current type of business. However, such analyzes should be regular, because trends are changing very fast and sometimes developers couldn`t watch for them.

 Monitor Twitter keyword mentions

Another good way to search in Twitter is to use keywords. With them you can find something specific, and it could be exactly what you need.

However, such mentions in every area could change with the time. They are like trends but have the strong task of finding and sharing information for users, especially in business.

You must have your pinned tweet

There is an option in Tweeter that allows you to put one of your tweets on the headline of the page. How you can use it? When users open your profile, the first thing they see will be this tweet, and they won`t look on the last tweet from the list.

What could be written it this tweet? Some extra information about your business, your services or goods or about your self as a businessperson. Remember that this short text draws people`s attention, so you should use it right.

Write non-standard headlines. Be creative.

This trick could help you to grow up your small business in every active social media, especially in Tweeter. You know how people look on fresh posts in the news feed – they just scroll them all and pay attention to the most interesting. Your task here is to attract potential subscriber and make him open your post. Your headline shouldn`t be more than 20 words long and show the main topic of your post. Journalists are working very hard to get a good headline to their article. Maybe you should do the same if you want to achieve success.

Start using UPM tracking

Have you ever heard about such tool? It`s main task is to help people to track social media user`s actions. You know where people clicked and what they do after clicking on anything. With this information, you will be able to change something in your content strategy or to use other keywords.

Conclusion

We know that Tweeter couldn`t give us features that we can use on Instagram or Facebook. However, it has its own unusual things that could help us to grow up our small business. the only thing you should remember while using all these methods is that you should combine them. If you will use them one by, one, you won`t grow while your competitors will be getting more powerful.

We hope that you enjoyed this article and will use our recommendations while working.

How to use social media to launch your product. Recommendations and examples.

Today, if you want to sell your product to someone, you must promote it. Promotion is a very tough process that allows you to use all possible methods of distribution your goods or services through all possible ways. It`s normal when people start their advertising with something like business cards. However, people in modern world use social media to launch their products. Why? Because your promotion will be free and you will have all power of current social media to tell everyone about your product.

We analyzed many examples of using social media for product launching and now we will show you the most workable methods with examples and detailed explanation.

Create a profile for your product. Use it for promotion.

The first thing that is necessary for every social media user is creating a profile. Even if you will just read interesting posts, like your friend`s photos and chat with other users, you need a profile. When other user sees your profile, they understand who you are, what you are interested in and what they can get from chatting with you.

If we are talking about launching a product through the social media, our profile must have some core points:

• The name of the brand.
• Description of the product. Basic information about how people can use it, what are the main advantages of it and how to get it.
• Price of the product. People hate when they need to open one million links to know how much could it cost.
• Information about the company. It`s good when you know who are you working with.
• Photo if the product. People should know how your product looks like.

However, if you have already created a profile, you should give it a normal look. Create your own design with one color gamma. You want to make your product popular, so people must remember it. For example, if you are launching a brand of energy drinks in red bottles, you should add photos that are made in one style – bright and colorful. Your task is to draw people`s attention and make them buy your product, so you should use different methods and stylized photos is one of them.

Make awesome promotional video

We can use different types of content to launch our product in the social media, and now it`s turn to use video content.

Video is a great variant for you because people don`t need to spend time clicking on it to find the most interesting part or to find important information. Promotional videos are always easy perceived, so they don`t need difficult phrases that should be explained to the viewers or something like that. However, every promotional video should have a strong plot. To show you how it looks like we will return to our example with energy drinks.

The video starts from the scenes where tired student or an office worker tries to continue working process. He wants to sleep and don`t know what to do (he already drunk a lot of coffee so nothing can help him). After that voiceover tells us that there is only one way to help this student or office worker. The next scene shows us a bottle of our energy drink. The voiceover tells us that this drink is made from natural ingredients and gives us energy for new tasks. We won`t fall asleep for six more hours and our body will work in the same rhythm. The final scene shows us a happy student who drinks our energy drink and continue working on his project. Than video ends with the phrase that motivate people to buy this energy drink.

Of course, it`s just an example. Your promotional video could have another script, you don`t need to use people in your video and there is nothing bad in it. Everyone has his own methods of work, and only you decide what to. However, if our example interested you, you can use it.

Cooperate with bloggers

People who follow bloggers on social media know that they have a bigger part of their income from advertisements. It means that we can also ask them to help us. You just need to choose the most popular and interesting bloggers, contact them and pay them for the promotion. You can send them your product, so it will be easier for them to make a good promotion.

If you see that people have reacted on such moves and started buying your product, you can continue doing such deals, but not very often.

Keep an eye on the competitors. Don`t let them steal your clients.

You should know that every developers or businessman who wants to sell his product or launch it through the social media face competitors during his work. It doesn`t matter in which sphere you work, how long you work and how good you are at the moment. One day you will see someone trying to beat you and become the best.

How can you “defend” your place on the market? Analyze your competitor`s content from the social media. If they are using some tricks that you`ve never seen before, it`s a signal. You should upgrade your arsenal of promoting moves. Put discounts on the most selling goods, create interrogations to understand if people want something to be changed. Client is your boss, so you must do everything to make him happy.

Use hashtags

Every popular social media gives user an ability to put hashtags under the posts or images. You can use this feature to launch your product in the social media. How? Remember that people can search for needed information not only by keywords or company name, but also by hashtags. However, to use such method you should create your own hashtag that will mark your brand out of everyone else`s in your sphere.

Final thoughts

The promoting process only looks like an easy thing where you need to spend six hours a day writing posts for your page in social media, create advertising campaigns and follow interesting accounts. You should know your audience to make the right promotion and know everything about social media you work with. You should be active as long as possible to get more traffic, make good strong promotion and be better than your competitors.

We hope that our article gave you some interesting information which may help you during your work with launching products in the social media.

How to use social media for your small business? Basic principles.

We all know how good it is to have a small business. You are free from routine paperwork and long boring discussions with the manager. You control every process of your work and are able to change everything (if needed).

However, to get your small business on a higher level, you should promote it by all possible ways. The most profitable method is to use social media to grow your small business. With time, people realized that it is better than any other kind of promotion. You don`t need to pay for advertisements on the billboards or print out business cards.

It this article we will show you the most common examples of using social media for your small business. After reading this material you realize that social media can upgrade every project in every sphere.

Attract clients. Interest them

In most cases, attraction is the key to the success. However, even this part of the plan must be completed in all aspects.

First of all, make your own advertising campaign. Tell people something about your business: what it`s made for, how and when customers could use it, where is the benefit etc. Create advertisement, which you`ve liked to see as a client. Here are some key parts of it:

• It`s the most important part because it shows how your business looks like. Your logo should be unforgettable for people, so they will return to your website again and again.
• Short and simple tagline. You don`t need to come up with something extraordinary. For example, if your small business is food delivery, the tagline should be like “You are getting hungry. Let us feed you”. Ok, this is a primitive example, but we hope you understand how to do it.

Create a group in the social media

If you use social media for your small business, you should create a group dedicated to your project. With it, your working process will be much easier because now your project is separated from your private social media account. If you want to add or change something, you should go to the group. Need an announcement about sale? Post it to the group, and all clients will see it.

Hire a team of developers to help you

Even if you have a small business in the social media, it`s hard to do everything by yourself. For example, if you have a group in Facebook, you should have:

• Content manager
• Administrator
• Writer who will create new advertising texts

You will have more free time to think about innovations or future upgrades. Don`t worry about income and fact that you need to pay salary to your workers. Teamwork is always better than individual one. You work more, you earn more. Simple algorithm.

Make relations with other businesspersons in the social media

One of the tasks of social media is to build relations between people, so why not to use it? You could cooperate and create advertising campaigns to each other. If you are a beginner, you can ask for some advice. It`s normal for people to help each other, so don`t miss your chance.

However, choose the right partners. If you see that this person or group is working in the same sphere, it could be risky. Don`t work with your potential competitors because they know how to steal clients from the rookies. If you do this, you take risks to lose all your income, so be careful.

Work on your posts

If you have already decided to use social media for your small business, you should use all potential of each platform. Here we will stop on three basic points of creating a perfect post:

• Thing that gain 90% of people`s attention while they are scrolling down the news feed. Your images must be as good as possible to attract clients. Show them that your services are better that anyone`s else.
• When person looks on the publication, he/she will probably read a text under the photo. You need to hit the right nail on the head. The perfect text will be less than four short sentences. You need to tell user about you, your job and say something like “come to me, I`m the best” in the end. Here it`s simple, but when you will be creating your posts, you should think well before adding it to the page.
• Final part of our triangle. People use hashtags to find information in the social media. If you want to be found by a happy client, you need to create your own hashtags. People will follow these hashtags and indicate your posts in the news feed. Simple? Yes! Let’s move forward.

Build reputation. It will help you in the future projects

Believe, if you are in the market with your small business for many years, people will respect you. Why? Because you have good statistic, positive reviews and army of fans and regular clients. Finally, your page in the social media is on the top of the board.

When other companies will contact you to start cooperation, it`s a good signal. As we told before, social media was made to build relations, so use this opportunity. You already have a brand, and now someone wants to work with you and pay money for that. Two or three years ago you have started from the bottom, and now you are the boss. That`s cool!

Keep an eye on the competitors

Everyone knows that business is the real battlefield. People are always fighting for the bigger income, their clients and traffic (of course, it`s social media). You should be ready for this.

When you start working with the social media, you will face difficulties. It`s normal, because every sphere of business has at least two developers who are competing between each other.

Analyze accounts of your rivals. If they are working for a long time, you can take something from their pages like an example. You are not cheating, it`s ok. However, be ready to fight for every single client that could come.

In the end…

To finish our article, we just want to say that there is no super formula of success while using social media for your small business. These points are just recommendations for you. Of course, you can combine them, add something new or use your own methods if they are more profitable.

We hope that you found it interesting to read such article and you will use it during your work. Good luck!

How to promote your blog to get more traffic? The most common ways

Today we can see thousands of bloggers in different social media. Creative people always want to realize their creative potential or knowledge as a blogger. It could be a channel on YouTube or a page in another specialized website. However, bloggers have to work a lot to achieve success and generate interesting content for subscribers.

Nevertheless, if you have already created a blog and start giving an interesting information to your audience, you should make a promotion of the blog. Why you need to do that? Well, you will get more subscribers and, as a result – more traffic. The traffic is the most important thing for every blogger. It doesn`t matter how much he/she could earn from the advertisements, but if they have low traffic, it`s bad for them. It this article we will show you the most common ways of promoting your blog.

Start your promotion with the social media

If you are a beginner in this sphere, you should understand that social media is the key to your success. People visit them to search for new information, look on good photos, watch cool videos or just to talk with their friends. The main thing is that in social media you can always find someone who will enjoy your content. Now let’s look on specific examples.

Facebook

The most popular social media in the world. People could spend hours sitting in front of the monitor scrolling the news feed or reading articles in groups. Facebook is always active, and you need to use this advantage to promote your blog.

First thing that you could do is to post an advertisement about your blog on the main page. Don`t forget to put a link into your post. What happens next? Your subscribers and friends see your post, click on the link and visit your blog. If they enjoy your content, they will tell their friends about it or even make a repost in Facebook to show other people.

Second step of promoting your blog in Facebook is called “Pin to top”. You probably heard about such thing, but we must mention it. Choose the best post in your blog (that has more views than the others) and pin it on the top of your Facebook page. When people will open it, the first thing they see will be this post. In most cases they open such links and look inside.

Instagram

Another popular social media where people can share their photos and videos and chat with each other. So how can you use for promotion?

Star with the stories. These short videos could easy tell your subscribers about the blog. For the first time, you can make a screenshot and post it into your story. Then, when the number of subscribers will rise, you can start posting a video. Also put a link in the description of your profile to let people visit the blog faster.

Next step that you can do on Instagram is to make regular posts about your blog (announcements of new articles, giveaways). If you want, you can create an extra account for your blog to increase promotion. However, only you will decide what to do.

Twitter

Someone probably will say that Twitter doesn`t have some huge advantages against other social media that we mentioned and all that you can do is to write a short text message on 140 symbols. Well, we are talking about advantages that we could use in our blog promotion, so let’s focus on them.

The biggest power of Twitter that could help in promotion is an ability to make a repost. It`s probably more effective than likes, because your subscribers will see that you have retweeted someone`s post. If they enjoy such information, they could repost it from your page or even visit it. That`s all, the job is done. People payed attention to your content and gave you traffic. Simpler than ever!

Use hashtags

This point is important for all social media you use, especially if we are talking about promoting our blog. If someone ask you how to promote a blog, the first thing you should say is to use hashtags. You need to use them as much as possible. Why? Users who want to see publication on a certain topic subscribe different hashtags. You can use this advantage to promote your blog. For example, create your own hashtag for a blog and put it under every single post. Subscribers will see them, visit your blog and give you the traffic.

Give regular live streams

Good variant for every person who wants to promote a blog in the social media to get more traffic. You can use Facebook or Instagram to start live broadcasting from every point in the planet where you have access to the Internet. The main advantage of such streams is that you can get feedback from the subscribers immediately without waiting. Positive moment for you is that you don`t have time limit, so you can give people all information that you want to say.

Conclusion

We showed you basic points of  with the help of social media. These ways are very profitable and have been used for hundreds of times. So, we hope that you will use them during your blog promotion.