Social Media Case Study

I thought it might be helpful from time to time to post examples of social media campaigns so we can observe and learn how to better run our own campaigns.

Recently, I saw a designer run a contest where the designer gave away a free dress on the designer’s Facebook page. Let’s call her Fran (we’ll change names to protect the “innocent.”)

Here’s how Fran ran the contest. She posted a photo of a dress on her Facebook page. The caption of the photo was something to the effect of “comment below by (date) to win a free Fran dress!” Fran then went out on Twitter and and posted about the contest. She got a lot of responses (30 +) and one person won a free dress. From that, the winner posted about the win on Twitter as well.

Was it a success?

If I was to analyze it, here’s what I would suggest.
1. If you’re going to run a Facebook contest, I think you should think through the contest and design a landing page tab on your Facebook page for it. Look, Fran got a lot of fans commenting on her Facebook page, but what did it gain her in the end? Was it worth a $300 dress? Fans she already had commented, but how many NEW Likes to her page did she get? How many emails did she capture? With a dedicated contest page, you can list the contest rules, present supporting information, request that a Fan take an action (like, and then click the “share” link before entering, for example), upsell a product (by entering, you can print a $5 coupon – or whatever), etc.
2. If you’re going to promote a contest on Twitter, use a # Hashtag and ask for ReTweets. Perhaps a good way to get your contest to go viral is to say that someone can earn an extra entry if they RT a promotion (which you can do automatically if you take a person to a Facebook landing page, see number 1.) You probably want to attract new fans, and the only way to do that on any ROI scale is to get your friend’s friends to take notice.

These are just two suggestions. There are many more, but we’ve hit two biggies here.

Was Fran’s contest successful? She probably thought it was. But with the right planning, and with the right social media guidance, it could’ve been worth the price of the dress that she gave away. As it stands, I would say she got about $20 worth of advertising.

What do you think of this case? What would you do differently?