So, your Facebook contest was wildly successful. Congratulations! You have tons of new fans, a fresh audience for your product or service, thousands of potential leads—now what? After the contest wraps up, how do you keep all those folks coming back?The real challenge of running a Facebook contest isn’t handling the logistics of the contest itself, but rather, figuring out how to maintain a connection with all those Facebook followers once the hoopla dies down. Ideally, you want to make your Facebook page so chock full of relevant, entertaining or compelling information that it becomes worth your follower’s while to return again and again—whether or not you offer them an actual incentive to do so.

Providing that kind of value to your Facebook fans can be achieved using a variety of strategies. Here are a few of my favorites…

Start a Conversation - Ask your Facebook fans what they think—of your company, of your product, of your latest advertisement—whatever! Encourage them to share their thoughts and opinions openly, and respond to as many as you can. Foster an atmosphere of honesty and mutual respect by handling criticisms with grace.

Share Tips - Give your Facebook followers information they can put to good use. Share tips on using your product more effectively. Point out features they may have overlooked. Advise them on how to get the most from your service. It will keep them coming back for more.

Host a Poll - Opinion polls are fun for Facebookers and pretty darn interesting for those of us in the back office. While they may not be scientific, Facebook polls offer an instant picture of how your followers feel about a particular issue. It’s a great opportunity to capture your audience’s attention and gain some valuable insight for your marketing team as well. Polls are also inherently interactive so encourage comments with votes and you’ll undoubtedly increase the chance that your polls show up in user feeds.

Show Your Human Side - People love to know what’s going on behind the scenes. Show them. Highlight your outstanding employees, post pictures of the firm’s holiday party, provide a of video-tour of the home office—let your followers get to know the people behind the products they’ve purchased.

Say Thanks - The success or failure of your business lies in the hands of your customers. Make it a point to say thank you. Post a personal message from the CEO. Showcase a “Customer of the Month.” Make it clear that you appreciate every single one of your customers and treat your Facebook followers accordingly.

A Facebook contest is a great way to get people in the door but keeping them around requires that you spend time and effort on the post contest content.

What are some of the best ways that you have seen to keep an audience engaged after bringing them in through a Facebook contest?

Some of the best ideas are the ones that at the heart are really quite simple but it is in the execution that the winners and losers are separated. The “coming soon” page has been a staple of Internet business from the very beginnings of websites. As the Internet got more mature so did these pages, initially showing countdown clocks to launch dates and eventually including email signups and social media links. So if the idea was so simple, why then were so many companies struggling to be able to use their coming soon page to help build momentum and hype before launch? Sure many companies promised that if you signed up and tweeted a specific line you would get an advanced place in their beta launch list, but really nobody had come up with a way to make this all automated and effectively simple. Enter Launchrock.

Launchrock executes everything you want in a coming soon page to perfection. It allows you to customize the page with a your own logo and just enough information to tease what your company is going to be about. It allows you to include both an email signup and social media links. Best of all they have built in mechanisms to help you build the momentum and buzz you want for your startup before you’ve even gone live. By letting you set incentives such as inviting 3 friends to get early access to the site, Launchrock has taken the best of what has been built in disparate places and brought it together in an extremely simple and yet beautifully executed online application.

Still in beta, you can sign up to get your own invite and of course if you share with your friends you will get that invite even faster. I highly encourage you to check it out.

QR Codes are everywhere from business cards to movie posters. I encourage those who sell physical products where you have the opportunity to include a label and where there is any sort of authentic backstory or marketing spin on the product to think about using a QR Code on the product labeling and integrating it with a social media campaign, email marketing and a dedicated website. There are an endless range of products with which you can tell a positive story and make a further connection between consumer and brand post purchase. From organic food to clothing you have an opportunity to engage your customers when they are considering their purchase, but even more post purchase. Check out how the Detroit Red Wings engaged consumers of programs at a home hockey game.Using a shoe company as an example, the amount of marketing support that goes into hyping a shoe product pre-purchase is amazing. However once a consumer purchases the shoes the connection to the brand is certainly felt in wearing the product, but the connection to the hype and the ability to make the customer feel warm and fuzzy about their purchase is lost. Why not include a little toe tag on the shoe that has a QR Code and informs the consumer that purchasing the shoe is just the beginning, they are about to enter the “insert shoe company family“. The shoe company could then use the QR Code to link to both a social site (Facebook) where there was an exclusive group for shoe owners only. Within the group the company could offer new videos, product information, create local events and best of all cross-sell and upsell products. Taking the idea of an integrated marketing campaign further, by using the date the QR Code was activated as a guide, the company could trigger an email marketing program that culminated with a coupon to get the next pair of shoes after “x” months. This would allow for the company to keep consumers connected to the brand for the months after purchase and give them an opportunity to become a repeat customer by giving them a feeling of exclusivity with the VIP coupon. You could even combine this with my advice to Non Profits regarding “Sponsored Stories.”

If your product is even more unique and you make it yourself or the backstory is genuine and compelling, you can and should find a way to use QR Codes to drive customers and potential customers to those stories. With websites being so cost effective to create and consumers rewarding brands who give them a reason to feel connected, you have the right ingredients to create brand experiences for your customers post purchase. I would highly recommend you check out some of the amazing way companies and individuals have used Moo cards to create labels and tags that are attached to products. With a little creativity and some technical savvy you could create a stand out product tag that also linked to your Facebook campaign which was of course integrated to your microsite and email marketing.

Using technology to help you connect your customers post purchase will make your level of repeat customer and therefore lifetime value of each customer that much more attractive. For more information on creating your own QR Codes here is a good start. Here are five unique uses for QR codes from Mashable

Your comments and thoughts are always appreciated…So are Retweets and Facebook likes or shares.

Post photo credit - http://www.flickr.com/photos/osde-info/4582939293/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Brent Leary recently wrote a post on the launch of Hearsay, the new social media company from former Facebooker Clara Shih (also author of The Facebook Era) and I thought it was most interesting to note that companies like State Farm and Farmer’s Insurance Group have already begun using the service. I’ll give a little upfront on Hearsay and then explain why I think it has found a real sweet spot that is missing in the Social CRM, Social Dashboard arena and why it makes for a perfect for tool for franchises and other similar business that have a head office and distributed local establishments.Hearsay says it is “the first social media platform for businesses with many local branches or reps.” It was built so that businesses and associations that have a head office location that wants to centrally control brand message can do so while still allowing local establishments of that business to leverage the social web with their customers, partners and prospects. This is especially important in regulated industries like finance, insurance and healthcare. With many local businesses and individual employees (including finance and insurance professionals) using social media with little to no oversight and when compliance is at issue you can understand why there is a need for corporate head offices to take some action and control.

With the ability to set corporate policies on social media accounts across the locally distributed businesses, companies have the ability to remain compliant while still allowing their employees to engage on social media. Further, by centrally distributing marketing content but allowing it to be localized by region, companies can run integrated campaigns and have real metrics upon which to build ROI and improve future campaigns. For the latest on Hearsay visit their Facebook page of course.

This is a big development in the area of Social CRM and Social Media Management because it really hits in a sweet spot, (that of a central command center for the enterprise that still allows for localization) that was missing a top notch product. While I can’t speak to the effectiveness of Hearsay in practice I can speak to the fact that it comes at a time when businesses in regulated markets are struggling for how to embrace social media in a way that is not cold and corporate while at the same time recognizing the ongoing usage by employees with very little corporate involvement. It may seem like a stretch but what if my broker “likes” a post on Facebook from a publicly traded company or favorites one on Twitter, did she just recommend that I buy that stock? While not every example is that dramatic there is a need for HQ to put controls in place and at the same time allow for individual usage. Hearsay seems to fit right in that niche.

Further, the ability to run a national social media campaign with localized content really gives companies the ability to tie social media metrics into their marketing and sales dashboards. The localization angle is important for many reasons. Of course language is among the top localization traits but it will be in the way that companies allow their local teams to utilize corporate assets where I think companies will reap the most benefit both in brand control and ultimately use of best practices.

Hearsay is an interesting company to watch and I think will be one that many companies – whether they be large enterprises, franchise or simply in regulated industries – will be looking to for unification and centralization of their social media marketing.

Check out the introductory video from Hearsay below.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TsupAdjvt5s

I was fortunate enough to hear Lee Lefever of Common Craft speak recently at Mesh Marketing in Toronto. He spoke eloquently about his business (a fascinating story) and described that he has been able to achieve success through what he termed “Mass Democratization”. It is a world where cheap tools combine with a home based business and a web only audience to produce a real revenue generating and full time income stream.

Lee has a fascinating story and there is a full post coming on his “Explainer Network” but I wanted to focus on a few of the many great communication takeaways from his presentation.

Starting with the fact that expectations are changing, there are too many sources of information and we care about too much stuff to digest it all, Lee and his team realized that the key to getting increasingly complex messages across to an increasingly disinterested audience was short web videos in “Plain English”.

The presentation contained some brief looks at some of the videos Common Craft have done and a discussion of the fine line between giving too much away on YouTube and wanting to license some of that same content but at the end of the day the key point was how much time is spent on the script and exact messaging of a three minute (or less) video. You need to really have discerned what you want to get across to a tight message and then let someone like Lee help you shape that into a package of ideas.

An amazing statistic Lee quoted a study at the University of Western Ontario (I would love the link if anyone has it) where by subjects both read information about a product and watched a short video about a product – after 72 hours only 10% of the readers could meaningfully recall what they read but 62% of the video watchers could recall something meaningful.

It seems to be a common theme for me but if you have something worth getting attention for then find great professionals to work with who can help you shape that message into something people will pay attention to.

Photo credit – http://www.flickr.com/photos/walleyjm/

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-A1l4Jn6EY