Giveaways are the latest trend in the social media world regardless of whether it is Facebook, Twitter or Pinterest.
There is a lot of controversy over whether this marketing strategy actually works or if it is a waste of time.
Giveaways or reward based incentives have been extremely successful for a few big brands. The skittle 2-for-1 campaign on Facebook was a huge success for the company with over a 100k fans joining in just the last 10 days. The American Express campaign called “I want to be with Coco” was a simple competition for fans to compete over tickets to Conan O’Brien’s tour. By the second day of the competition, their twitter users doubled from 12k to 24k.
Ad giveaway from Bing.
One of the biggest controversies was Microsoft Bing’s Farmville incentive. Fans that play Farmville are obsessed with gaining virtual currency to spend in the game. It was recently reported by the Guardian that a 12 year old spent $300 in savings and charged another $625 to his mother’s credit card just because he had to have more money to spend in the game. It was not surprising that when Bing ran an ad offering the same virtual currency for just being a fan of Bing on Facebook, a lot of people clicked the ad to gain some virtual currency. Sure, some people speculate that this was just a way of “buying” fans and the “fan” credibility is hampered, but the results speak for themselves. Bing gained 425,000 fans in just one day, which is triple the amount they started with and kept increasing to the point that Bing is now just trailing behind Google by 80k fans.
What a lot of companies forget is that growing your social media page is about quality and not quantity. What good is it that you have 500,000 fans, but none of them really even care about your product? It is not that social media is a bad way to expand your business, but it is important to remember that it is just a tool. As a tool, it should be used to help you grow, but it should not be the hub of all activity.
You do not own the social networking site, rather you own a business. Make sure that even if the social pages get stripped, your fans can always find your website.
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