In Part 3 of our Social Media Audit, we looked at what kind of content you should use and using on-site social media elements. Now let’s look at promotions.

Do you like to answer surveys, enter contests, and fill out short forms just for the change to win something? You do? Most of your customers do, too. With that in mind, audit your social media efforts through promotions with these tips:

Promotions

• Have bait: Do you have something worth giving away? Some possibilities are eBooks, whitepapers, coupon codes, or other free items. Use them as bait to get people to take action and interact with your brand. Run a contest with a prize at the end for the person with the best submission, most votes, or with a random drawing that includes all entries.
• Schedule the offers: Are promotions being mapped out? Do they coincide with holidays, seasonal sales in your industry, sales conferences or trade shows? Your regular business cycle can help you plan a promotions calendar that is effective.
• Terms of service: For promotions or contests, it is extremely important to have a Terms of Service on the promotion page or linked to your profile to ensure you protect your company.
• Reporting: Have you put a tracking or reporting mechanism in place to measure the effectiveness of your contests and promotions? These might include tracking new followers or fans to see if they continue to link to and interact with your page. Or flag newsletter sign-ups according to promotion to see which one keeps the highest subscription rate versus opt-outs down the road. Cross reference new online orders with the names of people who signed up for a contest to see if you received new business. No matte what your product or service, you must take the time to track and determine an ROI from your social media efforts.

In our next installment, we’ll cover tracking and measuring results. We’ll wrap things up with a look at what happens outside of your brand efforts.