JustNI Blog – Programming and startup chit chatCreating Change

Introduction- this is for both consumer and business brands/pages

I was recently requested to quote for a project for a potential client who had a major brand on their books and they wanted a flash game developed in a very short time. Not only did they have an unrealistic time frame to have the game developed (a week) but they had no experience with facebook games and to top it of they didn’t even have an idea of what game they wanted.
I suggested a cheaper solution (which I am going to detail below) that developing a game but they didn’t want to listen, therefore I quote an expensive price, if they wanted me to develop anything for them, they were going to have to pay for the headaches as well as my time..

What did I suggest ? -> “The gated competition”

The gated competition, bends facebook’s terms of service but is very much a common practice now on facebook.

The gated competition is where a user has to “like” (pass through the gate) in order to take part in a competition. Once the user has liked the page, they are then presented the next stage, which is usually to enter their details to be entered into a draw or presented with a download link to download the “prize”. You can see a page I made for a client-

So how do I win friends and influence people.. via facebook for my page

Firstly- this isn’t a “free” solution- you need to spend time/money advertising your page to seed the campaign. The value in this strategy is- that I can not find any strategy which returns the most return on investment which can scale in terms of developping new likes/leads on facebook

There are three elements that make up this process-

1. The page
2. The prize
3. The advertising

Without all three of these elements your campaign will not work fully

The page-

• The tab must be set as your default landing tab when someone visits your facebook page
• The tab must be gated- the user can only interact with the tab if they have “liked” the page
• The unlike tab must inform the user why they should like the page- your sales text
• The tab must perform relevant task- allow data collection or generate download link
• Once user has completed the task of the tab, they a presented to post to their wall that they have participated.
• A privacy policy should be used to tell users why your collecting their data.

The prize

• Give to receive. The prize is the incentive of why someone should come and like your page and enter for a chance to win the item.
• Pick a prize that matches what the target demographic of your product or service that your potential customer. would be interested in. The person who contacted me to in enquire about developing game had very specific demographic information- 18-24 years old and mainly male, I suggested a gaming console with the latest guitar hero, plus a hamper of the product they where advertising.
• If your a business to business page- give away a service or a product that matches what your business offers-

The advertising

Without advertising the strategy doesn’t work to its full potential- if you have a few thousand likes already it may increase your likes by 0%-10%-20% over a monthly time frame but with advertising it can see even greater returns. Advertise the competition and the prize!

Where to advertise

• Facebook adverts allow you to advertise by demographic information and interests- this can be more advantageous when advertising consumer products
• Google adwords can be used t target users with very specific key terms which can be more advantageous for companies advertising business to business products/services
• Offline- if your business has premises- having the facebook icon dotted about the place with the URL can help- include your facebook URL in all print – on the back of business cards right through to product packaging.

The why

• You can collect email addresses- you may not be able to get users to buy on facebook but people still buy from upselling in emails- groupon has seen their business explode with daily emails
• You can collect likes within a targeted demographic/interest
• You get most return on your investment. Instead of just advertising a facebook page- you can now collect email addresses and also encourage users to share content to their wall by making it the “next step” in the competition process
• Once you have people like your page, you can create shareable branded content

The formula

If you are not receiving enough likes from this strategy here are two points to consider
Your advertising spend is not high enough, increase your advertising spend and you will see increased date collected
If this didn’t work, maybe the prize was not a big enough fruit. Try the competition again with a larger prize.

The trial-

If you want to see how It looks- check out http://www.facebook.com/newyorkcolor which now use the competition software

The software

If you fancy using this strategy that has seen great returns – here’s what the software does

• Checks if the user has liked the page or not
• Validates and collects the data from the facebook tabs
• Has a separate admin to view the collected data.
• Separate Admin allows the export as csv to export data to an email marketing solution

This entry was posted on Monday, May 16th, 2011 at 12:30 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.