WalkerTek Blog

It seems like a week is a quick time frame to run a promotional contest, but it’s amazing how much we were able to learn in such a short amount of time. Before I get into the details, let me give you some background…

WalkerTek Interactive Marketing is a small business in northern New Jersey. We provide online marketing services from Web design and development and maintenance to search marketing and email broadcasting. When the iPad was officially launched, we thought it would be a good product to use for a promotion – the price point is good, the hype is good, and it would be attractive to our audience which consists of mainly marketing professionals.

We were originally going to run the promotion prior to the iPad coming out, but we wanted to make sure we had one available and that we could ship it right away, so we decided to wait a week.

The length of the promotion was selected for several reasons, primarily due to the work required to process the results from all three platforms. Since we were running the contest on LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter at the same time, we needed to make sure all the entries were collected and entered. All three sites limit the number of “calls” you can make to them with the API, so we had to run a process each night to collect the entries. As such, we limited the promotion to a week.

This post has a lot of information in it regarding the promotion, broken into the following sections:

Lessons Learned
Results
Recommendations

Lessons Learned

• When people reposted the URL including the quotes, it messed up the link on Facebook. We updated the messages so the URL’s weren’t near the end of the post where the quotes were.
• Some people needed my email address to connect with me on LinkedIn. We added it to the contest rules page. Not the best thing to do from a spam perspective, but since it’s a short promotion, hopefully it won’t be too bad.
• There seemed to be some confusion on Facebook where people would post the status message on our Facebook page as opposed to their own. Since this doesn’t really achieve the viral effect we’re looking for, we needed to let everyone know that they needed to post the message on their Facebook wall.This could be due to a couple of things, either confusion on the entrants part, thinking they were on their own page, or lack of clarity in the rules.
• We noticed that once one person did it, several others followed, so it is something we needed to keep an eye on. We addressed it with a simple message on our wall reminding people that they needed to update their own walls with the appropriate message.
• Facebook doesn’t like you running contests on their site. Unless it’s a simple “become a fan” contest, you need to get their approval and make sure you follow their guidelines. Information is available on their site at: http://www.facebook.com/ad_guidelines.php#!/promotions_guidelines.php
• This is more of an assumption than a lesson, but it seems like twitter works better with more frequent posts. If we posted as much to Facebook as we did to Twitter, I think it would become annoying for people, but since there is a lot of “noise” on twitter, people are more accepting.
• People use you. It was pretty funny, as soon as we announced the winner, we lost 4 facebook followers. Not a big deal or that surprising, just funny People are not connecting to you because they like the company or have a specific interest in you, they are interested in the prize. It is your responsibility to keep them engaged after the promotion.
• When scheduling tweets, make sure they are different than the previous tweet you sent, otherwise twitter will not accept it.

Results

The promotion took a lot of time to manage, because we were doing it on all three platforms. This was made a little easier with our use of HootSuite.com, however, it still required a minimum of a couple of hours a day to promote, respond, and track.

We were quite happy with the response, both from a quantitative and qualitative perspective. We received numerous comments about people who appreciated the contest, people who thought it was a good idea and even people who were going to steal the idea for their own companies. (Hopefully this blog proves useful for anyone else looking to do this).

The increase in followers is only part of the benefit of the contest. We increased our overall following by 145.37% from 335 followers to 822 followers. We saw the largest increase in number of followers on Twitter from 107 to 347, however, Facebook followers increased by the largest percent (423%) to 272 followers. See charts below.

In addition to the increases above, the overall traffic to the Web site increased significantly during the promotion. We typically get 30 to 40 visitors to our site per day. During the promotion, we got as high as 351 visitors to the site in one day.

The Google Analytics chart above shows the overall traffic to the site during the promotion from April 12th to the 16th, plus the following weekend and the Monday we announced the results. Obviously, less people were interested in the results than entering the contest

While we were promoting the site on all three platforms, it is interesting to see that we received more traffic from Google than we did from Facebook or LinkedIn. I was cockily thinking this was from these blog posts (as they do get indexed by Google very quickly) but upon further investigation, the links were mainly going to the iPad Giveaway page. It seems as though the Latest Results Twitter search on Google’s main page was responsible for driving a decent amount of traffic to our site. Google doesn’t show the Latest Results for every search, but I guess since the iPad had a lot of buzz, they decided to display it which helped to drive traffic to our site.

So what do all these numbers mean in terms of real business? Nothing.

Yet!

We didn’t get any inquiries for new work from the promotion itself, however, we didn’t really expect to. We are hoping that this behind the scenes proves interesting to other marketing people and would encourage them to contact us. In addition, it puts us in a much stronger position to discuss Social Media Promotions with the ability to show real results and talk about real experience.

Recommendations

We learned a lot and had fun running the contests, but, what would we do differently going forward?

I think the biggest thing we would do is separate promotions per site. Having the promotion be acros multiple platforms is probably not the best solution for several reasons.

LinkedIn doesn’t really lend itself to these types of promotions. They only show the most current three status updates from your connections and some people didn’t know how or that they could update their profiles with a status update.

Facebook has rules and regulations regarding the running of promotions, which frown on how we started running the promotion. I think a better route with a Facebook promotion (at least on a smaller budget) would be to set a contest where when you get to a certain number of fans, you would award the prize at random to one of your fans. This would also fit within their promotional guidelines. In addition, there seems to be more of a connection with your Facebook Fans than with Twitter followers. You can typically learn more about them and since conversations are threaded and easily viewable by all the other fans, it makes the experience more fun than on Twitter.

Twitter as a platform is great for running these types of promotions. However, on Twitter, people are dealing with a lot more “noise” (meaning there are a lot of messages that don’t really pertain to them, or that they have no interest in). As such, you can get away with promoting the contest more frequently, however, there is a lot less commitment on the part of the participant. I think this also dilutes the value of a Twitter follower, since the more followers they have, the more difficult it is going to be for you to get in front of them when you want to.

Finally, the simpler you can keep the contest the better it is going to perform. We had fairly straight forward instructions for entry on our site and we sill received some questions about how to enter, if people were entered correctly, people posting to the wrong places, and some questions on how to use the various sites themselves. In order to reduce the administrative time, keep it simple.

Thanks to everyone who entered the contest and everyone who followed along!

If you have any questions or want to know any more information, just ask…