Promotion

How to Work With Bloggers for Social Media Contests

September 14, 2012 by Kelsey

Bloggers that cover topics within your business’ industry can be a great untapped resource when it comes to promoting your social media presence to your target market. Some bloggers may be willing to post company-sponsored giveaways and guest posts on their blogs. These two options can help a company reach people who are interested in their products without spending a lot of money on advertising or branding campaigns.

Reaching Out

Send an inquiry letter to the blog owner or head writer offering to either do a blog post or giveaway on their blog. Try not to come across as salesy or spammy– otherwise your inquiry email might just get deleted immediately without consideration. Bloggers are getting requests for these types of promotions on a regular base so do your research. Come up with one or two specific things you like about their blog (such as a certain post or reoccurring feature) to prove that you are a regular reader. Be respectful and positive– bloggers encounter so much negativity and scrutiny on a regular basis so it’s important to come across as a great company to work with.

Guest Posts

Offer to do an original guest post on their blog (or compensate them for writing it) that includes some information about your business’ products. This content must also not be too salesy or spammy, as it can affect the blogger’s reputation and may turn off readers. At the end of the post, some blogs may allow you to give your social media profile links to get their readers to further interact with you online if they are interested.

Giveaways

Another option is to offer to host a giveaway of your products (or of a gift card to a well-known retailer, like Amazon) to readers of the blog. The acceptance policy of giveaway promotions will vary widely depending on the blog, so be sure to follow all the guidelines. Using a giveaway widget like Rafflecopter is an easy way to integrate social media into the giveaway. Make sure that the giveaway items are worth the effort it takes to enter. For instance, if a hair product company only gave away 1 hairbrush, it might not entice readers as much as a hair products gift basket with shampoo, conditioner, a flat iron, styling spray, and a Beauty Brands gift card. Bigger giveaways will get more attention.

These are just two options when it comes to working with bloggers to promote your social media and overall online presence.

Do you have any other ideas? Let us know in the comments.

How to Be Compliant with Facebook and Twitter Promotions

September 7, 2012 by Kelsey

The way that giveaways are managed via social media versus other mediums, like paper entries, text to win campaigns, or other methods. There are several things that need to be taken into consideration, including legalities and the established guidelines that Twitter and Facebook have established for promotions held on their social platforms.

Facebook Guidelines

Legal wording is very important, especially with Facebook, which specifies how contests should be held on their platform.

This is the wording in Facebook’s Page Guidelines regarding all Promotions:

Promotions on Facebook must include the following:

a.    A complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.

b.    Acknowledgment that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.

c.    Disclosure that the participant is providing information to [disclose recipient(s) of information] and not to Facebook.

iii.    You must not condition registration or entry upon the user taking any action using any Facebook features or functionality other than liking a Page, checking in to a Place, or connecting to your app. For example, you must not condition registration or entry upon the user liking a Wall post, or commenting or uploading a photo on a Wall.

iv.    You must not use Facebook features or functionality as a promotion’s registration or entry mechanism. For example, the act of liking a Page or checking in to a Place cannot automatically register or enter a promotion participant.

v.    You must not use Facebook features or functionality, such as the Like button, as a voting mechanism for a promotion.

As you can see from “v.”, you cannot use Likes as a voting mechanism for promotion. This is a rule that many businesses may violate. Making sure you are in compliance with all page regulations can prevent your page from getting penalized or deleted.

Twitter Guidelines and Suggestions for Promotions

Twitter’s guidelines and suggestions when it comes to contests are pretty clear and straight forward:

Discourage the creation of multiple accounts
Discourage publishing the same tweet repeatedly
1. Ask users to include an @reply to you in their update so you can see all the entries
2. Encourage the use of topics relevant to the contest
3. Follow the Twitter rules and regulations

It is important to pay attention to these guidelines, including reading them fully, so all your promotions are compliant and don’t experience any hiccups. It also protects your company or organization from promotion participants who could question contest procedures.

The Most Important & Effective Strategy When Business Blogging

June 18, 2010 by Robyn-Dale Samuda

Incorporating a blog within any small to large
organization’s website can be one of the most important decisions that could be made. Blogs are extremely effective for driving sales, web traffic, building brand awareness and strengthening relationships with customers. However, corporate blogging can be somewhat different from a regular personal blog due to differences in goals and audience but at the same time there are techniques that are guaranteed to produce results whatever the goals may be.

Let’s discuss what readers of corporate blogs are looking for and what elements will keep them coming back for more and even make a purchase. [Read more…] about The Most Important & Effective Strategy When Business Blogging

Blog marketing: Do social networks outrank search engines?

November 2, 2009 by Andy Merrett

An interesting article over at Promotion World declares why search engine traffic is not vital to blogs, outlining the strategies bloggers should already be using to drive traffic and, eventually, loyal readers to their blog.

At first I jumped to a conclusion, thinking that the author (TJ Philpott) was saying that search engine ranking and traffic is not important at all.

In fact, that’s not what’s being said — more that SEO (search engine optimisation) and ranking in itself isn’t a necessity for a successful blog.

This should be music to the ears of most bloggers — in fact, any web site publisher — because anyone who has been publishing online for even a modest amount of time knows how fickle search engines can be. One day, you’re riding high on Google, the next you’ve been mysteriously dropped (you probably didn’t do anything wrong, either).

It’s probably fair to say that most passing traffic comes to blogs from search engines — and the majority of that from Google — but the article suggests that spending a bit more time focusing on social networks and social media can pay real dividends.

It does depend to a certain extent on the purpose of your blog, of course.

If you’re merely trying to get footfall in order to increase revenue from advertising, then search engine ranking equals better traffic and more profit.

If, however, you want to build reader loyalty and sense of community (and in turn, perhaps, sell via affiliate marketing, which tends to do better once a level of reader trust has been built up) then SEO may not be enough.

Inbound links from other blogs certainly help, but they can be hard to achieve.

The article suggests that using social media to encourage visitors to your site may not only increase repeat visitors, but can give you a better insight into what readers actually want as you “socialise” on these sites.

It’s interesting food for thought, but the main take-home point for me is that, like income, diversification of visitor sources is vital for the success of most blogs.

I personally don’t think one type of marketing is better than the other, but both should be used in balance to bring visitors to your blog.

What do you think? Are you switching more towards social media marketing, or is SEO still very important?

Blogging Tricks Will Only Bring You Part of the Way

August 19, 2009 by David Peralty

Recently, I was working with someone that considers themselves an expert in social media marketing, SEO, and other popular terms these days for promoting a site and getting it some traffic. The person ran their ideas past me, and there were two things I quickly noticed.

The first was that they had probably read some blogs that told them to do various things to increase their SEO, things like bolding keywords, stuffing meta tags with keywords, and changing out H2 tags for H1 tags all in the hopes of beating their competitors.

The second was that they were focused on various tricks relating to creating landing pages, buying links, and other marketing methods.

All of the information this person passed by me was older information, most of which was nearly useless today as well as short sighted, with possible results that would end in disaster.

Imagine if you will, owning a blog for years, slowly building it up, trying to get to the next level in traffic, revenue and whatnot, hiring an “SEO expert” and having that person create, via tricks, some serious traffic.

You pay the person, thinking they’ve done a great job, and three months down the road, your site starts dropping in rankings, traffic dries up, and various other things happen that puts your site lower than it was before the “SEO expert” came along.

This is a far too common occurrence in blogging. Even the bloggers managing their sites make mistakes in SEO, marketing and social media in hopes of creating a hugely successful, viral, high positioned page that they can leverage in terms of making huge amounts of money or popularity that they can leverage in other ways.

People have to stop and realize that blogging tricks will only get you part of the way to your goals, and if done incorrectly they can actually cause huge setbacks.

Too much optimization, too overt in your self-promotion, and you’ll end up wishing you could undo your hard work.

The best advice I can give someone looking to do better with their blog would be to research as much as you can before you act in any way to effect your blog in any important way.

Don’t just leap into action after reading one person’s experience, and always check the age of the information because all the search engines are working hard at providing the best natural, gaming free search results.

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