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3 Easy Facebook Holiday Promotions

Black Friday has passed and Cyber Monday is over, but sales have just begun. They say, “strike while the iron’s hot” – what about organizing some contests over social media to get the buzz going and push more engagement and sales?

These days, pretty much all brands have a Facebook page and for all intensive purposes, it’s still one of the most effective platforms to promote on. With 217 million monthly active users in North America alone and 1.55 billion monthly active users worldwide, it offers you the best “bang for your buck.” Advanced hyper-targeting options help to make sure those bucks are well spent, too.

To keep the holiday traffic momentum going, you may want to consider trying out some holiday promotions. What are the benefits to running a holiday promotion on Facebook?

  • Users much more likely to share contests with their friends/followers
  • Create excitement among current followers
  • Engage in a fun, more human level
  • Reward loyalty

Promoting on Facebook also offers the flexibility of cost; you choose exactly what you want to spend and how you want to spend it.

How to Run Holiday Facebook Promotions

Chose a Prize

First things first – what are you going to be giving away? Your contest prize should be something that is inline with your business, but also an item people will want. A gift card to your store is a great place to start and when you deduct the cost of goods, it won’t really make too big a dent in your budget. A gift card will drive a customer to your store, which in turn can amount to extra add-on sales and return business.

Choose Your Promo

There are so many promos you can run and really get creative with, you just have to decide and plan it through. We’ll focus here on some basics that can be put together and running in no time and with little experience.

  1. Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes can easily be run through a variety of free and paid 3rd party apps and offer an easy integration and a customizable experience for fans. Look around to find one that is shareable and ideally, allows you to collect email addresses (which can be used for email marketing later.)

The drawback of running a sweepstakes is that once someone has entered, the engagement ends there. You can allow them to visit and enter once a day and yes, it gets them to your page, but there is pretty much no engagement.

  1. Contests

There are lots of fun contests you can run which drive fan participation and create a more approachable, human touch for your brand. Examples to try:

– Photo Caption contests: Remember the game Mad Libs? This is sort of like that. Choose a really eye-catching, compelling and fun photo (the more chance for humor, the better) for your fans to write a caption for. The caption with the most likes, wins.

– Q&A Multiple Choice: Trivia quizzes are entertaining and present a little challenge to participants, keeping things interesting. Your Q&A can be trivia about your company, your products or even about something unrelated. Paired with a nice, clean simple image (which hey, that can be part of the multiple choice, too!) it’s another great way to get fans involved.

– Crowd source contest: Why not give your fans a say? Crowd source contests not only help you, but also give your fans a feeling of ownership and pride. For example, I once ran a crowd sourced contest in which I presented 4 designs for reusable bags and asked fans to vote on their favorites, which were then printed in order of favorites #1-#3. When each limited edition bag was debuted, customers were lined up outside to get a bag they had a part in creating. The same can be done for logos, new product names and more.

  1. Deals & Limited Time Offers

Creating offers on Facebook is easy; it’s built in right at the top of your business page. Offers are basically like ads, only they run in the timelines (as opposed to in the sidebar) and like ads, you can drill down on targeting, pricing, text and image used.

To create an offer, go to the tab near your status update that reads “Offer, Event+” and choose Offer. From there you will be presented with your options, which you can fill in step-by-step according to how you want your promotion to run.

Another way to run an offer, which I’ve had success with, is to point them to your page directly by creating a post and then boosting it. This requires a little extra step as you’ll need to build a special page or blog post to host your deal details (which you’ve probably done anyway).

To run your boosted timeline promo, you’ll need to start with a great holiday-themed image. Not graphic design-savvy? Don’t worry, there are plenty of free image creator tools out there, such as Canva or Buffer’s Pablo that have the sizes you need built in, all you have to do is put your images together. (Keep in mind Facebook’s “20% text rule,” when adding text to any timeline image.)

Once you have your image ready, upload it like any other, include your text, promo call-to-action and the link to your promo page. Once posted, you can boost your post and target it towards your likely customers, based on interests, shopping habits, etc.

When running any promotion, always check on Facebook’s promotion rules to ensure everything is legit. Ready to begin? Good luck, happy selling and if you have any questions, please feel free to get in touch!

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