Gratitude – Successful Promotion via Facebook

A successful Facebook contest is over.. Here are some details about the way it went down.

The PRIZE was pretty cool. A $150 value – 2 pair of Tickets to our Masquerade Halloween Event (a pretty happening LA event for the Holiday weekend)
Run time – A Monday Morning through the next Tuesday evening – 6pm sharp

Just that day I read this helpful article about how Facebook determines how posts appear on other user’s walls. It shed some insight into the fact that I can in NO WAY rely on any given number of eyes seeing my content. So with this article in mind, I sought to spread as much activity across multiple profiles over the next two days to increase awareness of the event.

The Setup for the Giveaway was just a BIT confusing to some users, not everyone is familiar with the concept of “tagging”, PLUS I’ll admit I walked into a bit blindly by not taking individual privacy settings into consideration.

GIVEAWAY: RSVP to Masquerade: KCRW’s Halloween Ball – 2010 & invite your friends….!! TO WIN – just drop a fun or funny STATUS UPDATE on your Facebook page and TAG the Masquerade Event by typing @Masquerade: KCRW’s Halloween Ball.

The properly tagged status update with the most “LIKES” will win the pair of tickets. Winner will be chosen & announced tomorrow at the end of the work day. Spread the good word! On your mark, get set, GO..!!

I decided to routinely post UPDATES to the Masquerade event wall, as well as the KCRW wall, and also created an UPDATE w/ the new stipulation that I needed to be friended in order to see activity. (I had hoped that that status updates as well as the number of likes would appear on the Event wall itself.)

We have a base of 53,000 fans.

The total number of proper participants (meaning they tagged properly and friended me as admin or released privacy) was quite low at only 14. However, the most interesting part about this is that through only those 14 people, we got over 1,000 Facebook users to engage in activity surrounding our event. This is especially powerful b/c of those 1,000 users, one must assume a good fraction of them are strongly likely to convert to event attendees.

Who can know really how accurate Facebook’s estimated “impressions” are but the KCRW Facebook stats on the original contest post says 50,392 impressions and there areup to 67,613 Impressions on other update posts throughout. Of course this doesn’t take into consideration the number of additonal impressions that we received from the participant’s status updates. The general take-away is that we really spread outreach by encouraging status updates and likes across many profiles, multiple times throughout the two day span!

Lastly, administering the contest was quite a task. Constant communication with the participants and monitoring progress was necessary. It kind of felt like announcing at a horse race, and of course that excitement got buy in from tons of observers. I can’t know what direct effect the contest had on the increase in ticket sales (as we had tons of cross channel promotion going on from On-Air spots, to Street Teams passing out flyers.) BUT – our tickets numbers DID jump on Monday & Tuesday and we killed it with a completely SOLD OUT event. I’m pretty sure that the KCRW Masquerade ball was one of the best Halloween parties in LA.

In closing: Holly is our contest winner. You can get an idea of the emotional intensity of our contest through not only her thoughtful and endearing thank you, but also, her willingness to give up the other half of her pair of tickets to the runner up contest participant.