No matter what we write and how hard we try to convince companies to stop doing Like&Share competitions they still keep doing them. I was talking with a friend of mine about her usage of social media and she told me that she loves Instagram and Snapchat because her timelines are clean. Let me elaborate what she means by that. A ‘clean’ timeline would be when you log on to a social media platform and you don’t see spammy images with ‘share this’ and ‘like this’ and buy this dog food when you don’t have a dog for example. I told her that she can always report a post or an advert for spamming so she can have a better experience because that’s what I do. If I see something irrelevant I just click on hide this posts and see less from Sally or I remove Sally from my friends, depending on how much value Sally brings to me.
You see I get it. I took a step back and I understand more now why a business owner does the same thing as their competitor. Everybody is doing it, so why not me. Businesses see other businesses running these contests and copy them causing a rash of spammy images to spread across our news feeds. Let’s have a deep look on why these types of competitions are not worth it. Maybe you didn’t know but now you are reading this and kudos to you. I believe that you are a person that wants to improve your brand and be great.
- Spam Baby Spam City!
Facebook is trying very hard to get its advertising product right. We as human beings don’t like to see adverts in our streams, not to mention irrelevant adverts. It’s a tough call because Facebook needs to survive so they need advertising money but they need ACTIVE users to sell advertising. We all know that there’s no point in advertising in a football stadium when nobody is playing. That’s why Snapchat is dominating and is the top social media platform where people spend their time.
Posting an image as part of a like and share competition is low quality advertising. You are filling newsfeeds with adverts that users haven’t asked to see and are of little relevance to them. These kind of images can have an effect of turning people away from your brand. Is annoyance the emotion you really want attached to your brand? Most like&share competitions aren’t designed to make you smile, laugh, get angry or learn something. They are just heavy handed bad advertising. Nobody likes spam, nobody, even you don’t like it. Somebody might say that people comment that they LOVE me and they LOVE the gift (a lot of users do) but do you think they really LOVE you? Take a step back and be honest with yourself. Did they ever say we LOVE you when you put out a product to sell? They say that because they think that they have more chances of winning the gift. There is an incentive; the present.
2. Quality Likes
Now users can like and share something without liking the fan page. By liking a post doesn’t mean that people trust you. So basically if someone likes or shares it doesn’t mean that a user HAS to like your fan page. More frighteningly people who like a fan page as a part of a contest have no interest in your business, they just like entering like&share competitions. The same people that liked and shared your post will hide your posts after liking. This will tell Facebook that you are posting low quality content and they will show your posts to less people in the future. Actually no I apologise, not to less people, to nobody.
Last week we were analysing some people that write comments and share competitions and saw a girl that shared 87 times a Facebook Like&Share competition to win a perfume! 87 bloody times! I definitely don’t want to be friends with that user. I know some people don’t have the luxury or privilege to go and buy something but 87 bloody times? Nobody from her friends liked a single picture she shared… It’s a no brainer why.
3. Who Liked & Shared
When people like and share competitions you can only see people that shared the post publicly. Many users have by default settings to share posts with friends only. Even if they share it publicly, do you know who liked it? Do you have data? Nope. You can’t have data and you actually win nothing from users; no emails, ages, location, interests and likes. So basically it’s knowing that somebody liked and shared without actually knowing who did and most important you can’t do anything later, i.e send valuable newsletters.
4. Building Loyalty
When you start social media marketing you need to have a business goal aligned to it. You need to know what you want from your social media. Is it more leads, more online traffic, more sales? Achieving these goals happens over time. It’s amazing you got someone to share your competition image 200 times but what do you know about those people? Do they bring value to your business? Are they simply competition junkies? Don’t get me wrong some people could be your potential clients, some of them will like your page but many (the majority) will like and go. Now let’s take a step back. Is risking the loss of reach of further posts worth the return on investment you will see?
Building a community, creating loyalty takes a lot of time and effort. We all know that trust and loyalty is hard to create, it takes time and it takes the right strategy. It’s playing the long game vs the short game. To build loyalty we need to use emotions, we need to relate to our audience.
Now, you might want to win back your audience and don’t know how. Here’s what you can do; start creating great content that will educate and inspire people. Once you create great content start promoting this content. If you want to run a great competition create a Facebook App or a landing page where you can capture people’s details and have a clever question about your industry or brand.
