My Secret Weapon for Building an Awesome Facebook Fan Page

Facebook is approaching 1 billion users. A BILLION. No matter what niche you’re in, you can likely reach your audience on Facebook and as a business owner you probably already have a Facebook fan page. If you don’t you should set one up and if you do, make sure you come say hi to us on our page!

The Best Tool for Customizing Your Facebook Page

If you take a look at our page you’ll notice it’s pretty customized and more and more of you have been asking me for advice on customizing your own Facebook fan pages and whether or not it’s important. It IS important to customize your page and today I’m going to let you in on a little secret about how I make the She Takes on the World fan page awesome. My Facebook page secret weapon is Strutta, which competes with Wildfire and Votigo which are also worth checking out, and provides hands-down the most robust set of do-it-yourself (DIY) tools for creating custom Facebook apps and building and managing promotions on the social web.

Mighty Apps and Power Promos

Strutta has two platforms you can use: Mighty Apps and Power Promos. Mighty Apps is what I use on the She Takes on the World page to power the “Get the Book” and “Media Gallery” tabs. With Mighty Apps you can create unique coupons for you fans, bulletin boards of popular content, media galleries, forms, and a voting gallery. Power Promos is Strutta’s best product in my opinion though. Power Promos is how I built this amazing contest for the launch of my book earlier this year: With the platform that Strutta provides, contest organizers and their audiences can interact in an entirely new and intimate way – through sharing of videos, photos and other content as a key component of the contest. They make it super simple to launch the contests too. Anyone can do it, no tech skills necessary! Our contest got over 2800 visits and 563 votes, which definitely helped to raise awareness about the book launch. To be honest, I could have done a better job of promoting the contest but I had so many media appearances to make, interviews to give, guest posts to write, and a number of other engagements around the book launch that took up a lot of my time.

Using Contests to Boost Your Marketing Efforts

Why are contests so effective for engaging your audience and capturing new fans? People love winning stuff! Simple. Strutta CEO Ben Pickering knows just how powerful this concept is since he was a key member of the team at Yahoo! that worked with Frito-Lay to create the ground-breaking Crash the Super Bowl campaign. The campaign was the first mainstream promotion of its kind and is now entering its fifth year. Fans and aspiring filmmakers are given the chance to submit their idea for a Doritos commercial, which the public is invited to vote on, and the winning submission ultimately airs as a 30-second spot during the Super Bowl! The difference Ben cites between 2007, when the first Crash the Super Bowl was held, and today, is the emergence of social media. Back then significant amounts of advertising were required to generate awareness and drive traffic to the promotion. While a coordinated marketing plan is still essential to run a successful promotion, there is less of a reliance on paid media today and much more potential to “go viral.” However, as Ben is quick to point out, you must not fall victim to the belief that “if you build it they will come.” Simply putting a contest up on your Facebook page isn’t going to do a whole lot for your brand unless you are promoting the heck out of it and making sure your fans know about it.

Promoting Your Promotion

It’s not rocket science but to see the benefits of generating new fans and deepening engagement with those consumers you’ll need to first think about how you will reach your audience. Existing marketing channels, including email and social media, are a great place to start. Once you are able to generate a critical mass of consumers interacting with your promotion you will begin to see the benefits of social promotions as users begin to share through their networks. I asked Ben for some tips to consider if you are thinking about running a social promotion. Here’s what he says:

• Define realistic goals
• Design a promotion that aligns with your goals and audience
• Don’t over-complicate – a concise premise, clear call to action, and accessible UI will outperform “clever but complex”
• Know the legalities of running a promotion or work with a partner who does

Want to try building and launching a social promotion through your Facebook fan page with Strutta? Strutta has a no-risk free trial you can use for 30 days to test out all their juicy features and tools. Check it out and let me know what you think! [Disclosure: Strutta was the official sponsor of the Facebook contest I ran for my book launch and I have a complimentary trial membership to their platform currently. I don’t often recommend products on She Takes on the World though and I only make recommendations when I’ve tried a product and truly love it.]