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Weekly Campaign Idea: Encourage Sharing

This content discusses the importance of incentivizing fans to share promotions and provides three smart ways to encourage sharing.

By Dana Kilroy ・2 min read
Campaign & Contest Ideas

One of the top ways to drive more traffic to your promotion is by encouraging your fans to share it with their friends. However, sharing a promotion isn’t exactly as appealing to users as photos of their cats or babies!So what will encourage your entrants to share your promotion with their friends? Incentives of course! If you can offer your fans some sort of prize or additional entries for sharing your promotion, they’ll do it!With the sharing opportunities provided by third party platforms, like ShortStack.com, it’s become more exciting for entrants to share their promotion activity, and businesses are seeing an increase in entries because of it. After all, 84% of consumers say they either completely or somewhat trust recommendations from family and friends about products.

Here are 3 smart ways that any marketer can encourage sharing on their next promotion.

1. Offer extra entries

Refer-a-friend promotions are a time tested strategy for encouraging entrants to share a promotion with their friends. When a business uses ShortStack.com’s refer-a-friend feature entrants are immediately rewarded with extra points (or entries) when they share the promotion and their friends follows the link and enters the same promotion. The campaign owner is able to select the number of extra entries that people will receive from referring a friend. Refer-a-friend works slightly different depending on the type of promotion that’s being run. For a contest with voting, bonus points are added to the referring friend’s vote total. For a giveaway without voting, you can use the points to award bonus entries.

Here is how the refer-a-friend feature works for the fans entering your promotion:

1. He or she submits an entry to the form.

2. Upon submission, a popup appears that explains the Refer-a-Friend bonus (you can customize this text), along with a Share button.

3. The visitor clicks Share to see the usual Facebook Share dialog, then shares to his or her Timeline.

4. A unique link is included with the share. When one of the referrer’s friends sees the post in his or her News Feed, clicks on the link to visit the Campaign, and submits an entry, the referring user receives bonus points (you determine the amount).

5. If you display entries in a Voting Widget with sharing enabled, sharing an entry will also credit that entry with bonus points should anyone enter the contest from the shared entry.

2. Encourage sharing after specific actions are taken

The great thing about using a Campaign to run a promotion is that it provides a variety of opportunities to encourage your entrants and visitors to share your promotion. There are two specific times during a users experience on a Campaign that have proven most successful for adding a share prompt. The first is after someone has submitted information into a form. This means you’re providing a convenient way for your fans to share your promotion once they’ve successfully entered the data you’re asking for in your Campaign. If entrants choose to interact with the share prompt they’ll be able to share the promotion to their Timeline.The second is after someone has participated in the voting element of your Campaign. Using ShortStack.com, you can show the share prompt to a user after he or she votes on entries that have been uploaded by you or your entrants.

3. Use social share buttons

There are two types of Sharing native to ShortStack.com: sharing the entire Campaign, and sharing the content of an individual widget. Both methods require that you first add at least one Share Widget to your Campaign.

The Share Widget gives visitors up to six different ways to Share a Campaign: via Facebook, Twitter,Pinterest, Google+, LinkedIn, or Manually.

You can configure a Title, Description, Image, and more to accompany each Share. The Share Widget works in conjunction with other widgets on the Campaign. You can add one Share Widget and configure it so that all of the other sharable widgets on the Campaign pull information from that one Share Widget, or you can set up one Share Widget for each sharable widget on your Campaign. For more information on connecting a Share Widget to another widget on the Campaign, see the  Widget Sharing article.

About the author

By Dana Kilroy ・2 min read
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Dana Sullivan Kilroy is a communications professional with more than 20 years of experience delivering compelling content. Her work has appeared in national, award-winning publications and sites, including: The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, and Fast Company, Inc.

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