Social Giveaways: You're Overthinking It
“We’re giving away a $50 gift card!” you post on your Timeline. To enter, all a user has to do is “like” your Facebook page, leave a comment, check into your business, fill out a form, email in a photo, and share the contest with 25 friends. You give yourself a pat on the back. This is going to be the best promotion ever.

False.

If you even get an entry (and I doubt it), s/he will be one of the crazy psycho kind that spends all day trolling for free stuff. Trolls don’t do that much for your brand. Real people with real influence don’t want to spend all day entering your Facebook contest. Keep it simple.

Too many inexperienced social marketers think they need to add a bunch of steps to make their promotion more original. Just last week, I ran across a promotion that, after filling out a form, required the user to read a blog post (I didn’t) and leave a comment (I did). I noticed that the rest of the comments were just as crappy and irrelevant as mine. That’s not engagement. That’s not buzz. That’s clutter that nobody’s going to read.

If you’ve ever done a giveaway with GroSocial, you’ll notice we encourage this simple three-step process: “like,” enter an email, and “share.” Liking gets you new fans. Asking for an email allows you to announce the winner without breaking Facebook guidelines. (You’re not supposed to notify winners through Facebook posts or messages.) And sharing allows friends of friends (of friends) to know about the contest and enter. Simple, easy, effective.

Using our like-email-share formula, Mountain America Credit Union consistently generates thousands of likes per promotion. One of their promotions generated just under 10,000 likes!

So use your creativity to come up with unique prizes, not long and annoying entry processes. Your fans will love you for it.

How to Use Email Marketing to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts

Too many business treat email and social media as separate marketing channels, but if used together, they are a powerful duo. If you want to learn how to combine their powers, sign up for our upcoming webinar:How to Use Email Marketing to Boost Your Social Media Marketing Efforts, cohosted by Mad Mimi, on Wednesday, August 22 at 11AM MDT.

Grosocial knows social media. Mad Mad Mimi knows email marketing. This is gonna be good. Register here.