Make Your Campaigns Go Viral -- 3 Must-do Tips

It’s easy to reach out to your existing online followers. But what are you doing to  drive new traffic? According to Facebook, “80% of consumers say they are more likely to try new things based on a suggestion by a friend in social media. ” Therefore, if you’re not building features into your Campaigns that enable and encourage your users to tell their friends about your business, you’re missing out on one of the major benefits of social media – viral sharing (which is not the health hazard it sounds like!). To make sure you’re doing everything possible to increase viral sharing, remember to:

1. Enable Sharing

Enabling the share prompt is fundamental to getting more traffic to your Campaign. The beauty of this ShortStack feature is that it can be used with any Campaign, whether it’s a contest, sweepstakes, poll, or landing page.This feature works in a few different ways. You can enable the share prompt which triggers a pop-up to appear after the user clicks “submit” on your entry form. This method of sharing will only work in conjunction with a Form Widget. You can enable the share prompt to trigger after a user casts their vote, which does not require the Form Widget but requires the Share Widget and the Voting Widget. You can also enable a share prompt in a popup using the Action Widget to open the share dialog of a widget that has sharing enabled.In addition to the above three methods, you can also Enable Sharing within most widgets in your Campaign, which will add a “Share” button. Users will be able to click and Share to their social networks. Enabling Sharing within a Voting Widget will actually enable each contest entry to be shared. This is a great way for users to promote their own contest entries and get their friends to help them win.

2. Incentivize Referrals with Refer-a-Friend

Enabling your Campaign's sharing feature is a great step, but an even better way to get users to go to your Campaign is to incentivize the sharing through a ShortStack feature called Refer-a-Friend. Here’s the gist of how this feature works: When you’re running a contest or promotion, upon submitting an entry, your users will be prompted with a link to Share with their social networks. The link they’re given is special in that it will be tracked by ShortStack. If a friend of the user clicks on the link and enters the promotion, the original user who shared it will be awarded with extra votes or “points.” You can configure the Refer-a-Friend text that the users see, and how many votes/points they will receive. Refer-a-Friend is a win/win for you and your users. The more they promote your Campaign, the more likely you’ll get new users, and the more likely they are to win your promotion.

3. Embed Your Campaign on Your Website

After you design your Campaign you can publish it and embed it on your website. It's beneficial to have your Campaign on your website because you'll have the ability to drive your organic website traffic to your Campaign. We recommend adjusting your homepage to lead your fans to your Campaign.When you embed your Campaign there are three options for how your Campaign will appear on your website based on the embed code you choose.

• Responsive, which has the ability to resize itself automatically. This code is ideal if you have widgets on the Campaign set to Starts Hidden. Check the Automatically Scroll to Popups box to scroll to popups when visitors access them. Enter a number of pixels in the Vertical Offset field to make sure the Campaign always remains visible when scrolling with Action Widgets.
• Fixed does not automatically adjust its height. If the height of the Campaign is variable, use the fields below the embed code field to enter the Campaign's maximum possible height.
• WordPress embed code is code that is specially generated for use with ShortStack's WordPress plugin. Install the plugin before proceeding.

Remember the old saying, “Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd?” If you’re like most people, you build Campaigns to collect leads, increase your presence and engagement through your social networks.

Why not let your users do the heavy lifting for you by enabling and encouraging them to reach out to their (potentially) hundreds of Friends? A little extra work on your end, could mean a whole lot of extra exposure for your Campaign.