By Amy Slife

Social media novices and companies who have yet to enter the space might be the first to say the social sharing medium is a fad, but the growth numbers for many social media platforms should show anyone questioning the staying power of social media otherwise. According to a Nielsen survey of February 2010 social networking usage across 10 countries, the average time a person spends on social sites is five and a half hours per month. Of the countries surveyed, Italy landed in the top spot with just shy of 6 and a half hours per person and Japan fell at the bottom of the list with 2 hours and 37 minutes per person being spent on social networks. (The U.S. landed third with a hair over 6 hours per person.) You might think 5.5 hours a month spent on social networks doesn’t sound like much given the average 31 day month is 744 hours long, but the kicker is that globally we’re spending 2 hours more a month on social media than we did last year.

This blog post will dive into social media usage stats for four popular social networking platforms that show social media is here to stay. If you’ve been working to convince your C-suite that social media is a key element to have in your marketing mix, some of these numbers might assist you doing just that. Is there one social network that you tend to use more than others or you think has greater sticking power? Share with us in the comments below!

Facebook

With its 400 million users logging onto the site at least once a month, and with 50% of those users logging on every day, Facebook is squashing its social network competition. According to the same Nielsen survey mentioned above, Facebook is the social network destination worldwide. It accounts for almost 6 hours per user session across the globe and the average user logs on 19 times a month. According to a Facebook fact filled infographic, which you can see in its entirety here, 70% of Facebook users live outside the U.S. and it’s the second most trafficked website, behind Google. Facebook’s lead in the social media market and plethora of new features, elements and redesigns being added each year illustrate its stronghold in today’s environment and many brand marketing mixes around the world.

YouTube

YouTube turned 5 this month, and Sunday, via the official YouTube blog announced that the platform has surpassed two billion views per day. Now if my math is right, that’s over 83 million views per hour. That’s a lot of YouTube video watching going on around the planet. For an even more convincing YouTube stat, the two billion views per day, according to the post, is about double the audience for the three major TV networks in the U.S. during prime-time TV hours. Another interesting stat, as of a March 2010 article, states that 24 hours of video is uploaded every minute. Not only can the average Joe upload their own YouTube video, but it’s a place for companies and brands to house and share their own viral video content. Five years strong already, YouTube seems to be illustrating true social media sticking power.

Twitter

Our 140 character-only social media network experienced similar significant growth in its early days, much like foursquare’s recent growth (see below for more on foursquare!). According to a report on Twitter usage as detailed here, Twitter’s awareness level is now on par with that of Facebook, as such 87% of Americans are aware of Twitter, and only 5% were aware in 2008. While it’s safe to say the majority of Americans are aware of Twitter, only 7% of the population is using this social network. While this population usage rate seems nil in comparison to that of behemoth network Facebook, some specifics on who that 7% consists of might surprise you and encourage your brand to jump on board with Twitter. The study found that Twitter users are more likely to live in higher income households and are also more likely to be following brands on Twitter versus on other social media networks. This in itself might encourage your brand to jump on this network to spread the word, assist with customer service and offer promotions.

foursquare

Location-based social networking platforms, like foursquare, are the newest kids on the block, but I think it can be said that location-based social media is the way of the social media future. In last Tuesday’s blog post, 4 Reasons to Foursquare, I mentioned how other social networks like Twitter have added options for location-based tweets, and that Facebook is rumored to soon be launching their own version; location, location, location is the direction the social media world is moving. The company that seems to be doing it right so far, and growing at some pretty incredible rates, is foursquare. On Monday, foursquare tweeted that’s they’re averaging 600,000 check-ins per day, and earlier this month it was 40 million check-ins total, up from 22 million check-ins five weeks prior; that’s almost double digit growth in just over a month. In late April foursquare hit the 1 million registered user mark, growth that was encouraged by the 100,000 accounts that were created in the 10 days of SXSW. With other networks jumping on the location-based bandwagon, it’s safe to say the popularity of foursquare’s fun check-in based social networking platform has tapped into a new social market that’s going to continue to grow and spread throughout the social media world.

By Jenna Lebel

We frequently offer tips for growing your Facebook fan base, but recently we have also received many questions about how to utilize Twitter. It’s certainly not a simple task to gain loyal followers, and it depends largely on the content of your tweets. Here are some tips every one can use  to help you increase your followers. Do you have other tips for growing your audience? Share them with us!

Tweet Well

In a previous blog post I provided tips for creating better tweets and ultimately a better experience for your followers. Here are some highlights: keep your tweets shorter than 140 characters to maximize retweetability, add more value and be less promotional, be human and add a personality to your tweets,  and retweet others while adding something to it.

Tweet Regularly

It’s pretty simple. The more active you are on Twitter the easier it is for you to establish yourself and people to find you. If you only tweet a couple of times a week, where is the value in following you?

Use Hashtags

Hashtags not only allow you to index your tweets, but they also allow others to find you. Use hashtags when tweeting about something important to you or something you talk about frequently so that when people search for the topic, they find your tweets and can expect similar content from you in the future. If everyone agrees to append a certain hashtag to tweets about a topic, it becomes not only easier for users to find that topic in search, but it increases the chance of the topic appearing in Trending Topics.

Engage in Twitter Conversations

This not only includes responding to @replies and finding people tweeting about similar topics as you, but it also includes participating in Twitter chats like #FollowFriday, #MusicMonday and others.

Ask Your Followers to Retweet you

It may look desperate, but asking costs nothing and often gets positive results. Ask for a retweet (“Please RT”) and let your followers spread your word.

Follow Users Who Share Similar Tweets

Use Twitter’s search engine to find people talking about the topics that you talk about and follow and engage with them.

Promote Everywhere

Cross-promote by providing the link or adding your Twitter stream on other social sites. Add your Twitter handle to all current channels of communications (website, email signatures, business cards, etc.).

by Leo Mikinberg

If you haven’t already heard the buzz, Mark Zuckerberg and the rest of the Facebook team have announced a new initiative that may change the way you interact with Facebook and the rest of the web. The new “Like” button is part of a larger project called Open Graph, which is an attempt to incorporate Facebook into every possible page on the internet. Once you’ve logged in to your Facebook account, you will be able to surf the web and see just how many of your fellow users and friends “like” the website and content you’re checking out. While this sounds harmless, this announcement has ruffled a lot of feathers because it brings with it further changes to the very sensitive, and often controversial Privacy Policy. To clear the air and give a better picture of what is in store for a new Open Graph world here are a few pros and cons of the changes.
Cons:

1) Privacy Policy Goes Gray – The Privacy Policy on Facebook continues to fall into a gray area where the lines between private and public are constantly blurred. With the newest changes a lot of your information, including your name, names of all your friends, pictures, gender, likes, connections and shared content are, by default, visible to everyone.

2) You Choose Your Privacy Settings… If You Can Understand Them…Sort of -Facebook has always given its users the ability to limit who sees what on their profile. Over the years the options have gotten greater and the jargon has gotten much more confusing. Attempting to limit who can view your Facebook page is no longer a quick fix, but instead is a time consuming, head-scratching process that may leave you wondering what you just did or didn’t do. This becomes even trickier when you are trying to make your information more private. You may take the initiative to prevent people from being able to see that you are connected to Jane Doe, but she may have her settings on default; if that’s the case someone can still see that you two are connected through her Facebook page.

3) Now I Like It, Now I Don’t – With this new found ability to bounce around and “Like” every picture, article, and other piece of content on the internet, some of us who are known to get a little trigger happy may end up liking something that we either find we don’t really like or just don’t want the world to know we like. In the event that you did like something and want to unlike it, the process gets to become a bit of a nuisance. To remove the like you would have to head back to your Facebook profile, find your likes and interests to single out the individual object (which could at that point be one of hundreds) and remove it. If you are not a heavy user of the like button this may only be an inconvenience, but for those who are going to be liking regularly it may become more of an issue.

Pros:

1) Instant Personalization – No clever title needed here. Instant personalization, as Facebook has started to call it, is the best example of what is possible through Open Graph. A handful of websites like Yelp, Microsoft Documents and Pandora are going to be able to connect to your likes and interests so they are better able to customize the services they provide. Pandora can be able to better serve you by knowing what music you already like and are listening to, while Yelp can use your location to bring you more accurate responses. Social Commerce Today gives us a better look at what these three sites are doing with Instant Personalization here. While we may not see too many websites with the resources or the know-how to create this level of Facebook integration in the near future, it is a small window into what a social web can look like.

2) Go Straight to the Good Stuff – Even the best bloggers or newspaper columnists have their bad days. With the new “Like” feature, you will soon be able to see just how many other Facebook users and friends think that an article is worth reading. The same goes with almost any piece of content out there for the public to consume. Assuming you trust your friends’ judgment, you can skip over the stuff that isn’t “fit to print” and go straight for what is.

3) The Early Bird Catches the Worm – The businesses that are moving quickly and taking decisive steps to make sure that they are using the new “Like” feature to the best of their ability are already starting to show strong gains. While IGN is in no way new to cyberspace, it has shown a 20% increase in referral traffic from Facebook since it has begun incorporating the “like” button. This is of particular importance because many businesses that find themselves with active pages on Facebook may be surprised with the impact that implementing the new button will have on the traffic going to their respective websites. This feature is going to be beneficial for those surfing the web as well as the people who are creating the content.

Now that you’ve seen a few of the pros and cons, what’s your take on Facebook’s “Like” button and its Open Graph?

By Amy Slife

Early this month, foursquare exceeded 40 million check-ins, as reported on Twitter by one of the company’s developers. This means the number of foursquare check-ins is growing at an incredible rate, doubling in approximately a month’s timeframe. We’ve seen foursquare’s incredible growth rate before when 100,000 users signed up over a 10 day period during this year’s SXSW. theKbuzz has already covered examples of companies utilizing foursquare for deals and promotions, but for all of you foursquare hold outs, I’m going to detail four reasons why you should jump on the bandwagon.

1. Location-based updates, check-ins and promotions are a way of the future, and the very near future at that. It’s safe to say that the newest craze in the social media world seems to be the location-based feature. From check-ins on foursquare, to adding your location to your tweets on Twitter, to news that Facebook is launching its own location features at some point in time this month, it’s clear that location-based functionality is on the rise and probably here to stay. As more companies sign up to offer deals and promotions through location-based social media platforms you don’t want to miss an opportunity to reap the great rewards.
2. Foursquare is fun and competitive. While it might seem a little silly on the outside, I think there are many users out there that can attest to the fact that once you get into foursquare you become a little obsessed with it. After all, it truly is a game and most of us have some competitive nature to us. We strive to have the most check-ins to a venue so we can become “Mayor” for the sake of just being able to brag about it to our friends and coworkers. For example, I proudly hold the title of Mayor of theKbuzz Boston. While I’m not currently receiving any perks for holding the title, it’s still fun to check in and encourage my colleagues to challenge me for the position of Mayor of the office.
3. With foursquare, you can get tips left by your friends for places around the location you’re checking in. Not only does checking in to a location allow your friends to figure out where you are, but you can see what your friends liked at that location or at locations nearby.  To illustrate, I’ve left the tip for my foursquare friends to try out a breakfast sandwich at one of my favorite coffee shops. When they check-in to the location, or a location nearby, they get a message to try out the Tequila Sunrise at Espresso Royale Café. On the flip side, I’ve received tips from my foursquare friends to try out different menu items or restaurants and bars at locations I’ve checked into. Wouldn’t you be more likely to try out a new eatery or a new menu item if it was recommended by someone you know? I know that would encourage me to expand my horizons.
4. You can get useful tips and fun facts from companies and brands. As you can expect with the growing number of folks checking in on foursquare, there’s also a growing number of companies offering deals. But beyond deals and promos, some of these companies are using foursquare to share their expertise, recommendations and fun facts. Bon Appétit is guiding their foursquare friends to “the best epicurean destinations on the planet” with foodie tips based on where you are and what you’re doing. Additionally, HISTORY Channel has a foursquare account, which provides tips to help you “unlock the history of your city.” HISTORY has set up their account to enable their friends to receive tips about America, unlock a special badge and be entered into special sweepstakes and win weekly prizes.

Have you joined foursquare? If so, how do you use it and what’s your favorite part? If you’re a foursquare or other location-based social media network holdout, share with us why you’ve yet to join and if there’s anything that would change your mind about doing so.

by Devin Sugameli

As proud members of the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA), we were all super excited to see this year’s promising School of WOM lineup. Whether or not WOMMA actually chooses to refer to these panel presentations as “classes” per today’s blog title, we’re confident that the lessons we learn at this conference will do more to further our education about word of mouth marketing both on- and off-line than your standard marketing major course load ever could. Here are the Top 10 sessions we’re most looking forward to:

1. Keynote: Kodak’s 4 E’s of Marketing: Engage, Educate, Excite & Evangelize. There isn’t an intro to marketing student out there who hasn’t heard of the 4 P’s; how better to set the foundation of word of mouth marketing than with Kodak’s 4 E’s? Kodak’s Keynote speaker Jeffrey Hayzlett, Chief Marketing Officer and Vice President of Eastman Kodak Company, will be taking us through Kodak’s experience in using social media to connect and build relationships with customers, plus showing us how Kodak managed to multiply the impact of its marketing programs without breaking its budget.

2. Best Buy—Using Passionate Employees to Help Launch New Business Opportunities. Best Buy was faced with a challenge: how does a “big box retailer” like Best Buy enter the musical instrument category without alienating musicians with already deep ties to music industry-focused retailers they’ve come to know and trust? As the company’s been known to do before, it turned to its employees as the ultimate brand ambassadors, empowering them to start and grow the conversation with customers everywhere in an authentic voice. We believe very strongly here that in many cases your employees can be the most powerful brand resource you have, and we hope to see even more brands inspired to empower their employee bases in a similar fashion.

3. Keynote – Dan Heath. Dan Heath is co-author of the books Switch and Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die. theKbuzz’s own Jenna Lebel is a personal fan of Dan’s, having read Made to Stick and finding it “super interesting” – and we can’t wait to hear more about Switch’s stories of everyday people effecting transformative changes in their families, companies, and daily lives. While not directly related to marketing, Dan’s exploration of the power of united minds is inspiring for social media’s power to bring even more minds together more easily than ever before.

4. Coca-Cola | Putting Coke Zero on the Map. Coca-Cola is a brand that knows how to inspire its fans. If you’ve ever struggled to acquire organic entries to your online video or photo contests, you need look no further for an example of a brand that successfully encourages that content creation and proudly shares it with the world. Roberto Mastracola of Coca-Cola & Sarah Hofstetter of 360i will teach attendees about the keys to building a veritable fan arsenal on social media by including, engaging with, and rewarding them.

5. Navigating Regulated Industries: Learn What Your Next Step Should Be (Parts 1 & 2). As corporate investment in social media marketing has exploded over the last couple of years, regulated industries (think government involvement) are still understandably anxious to throw themselves full force into world with far fewer clear, established legal guidelines than traditional advertising. According to its schedule description, this panel “cuts through the jargon and hyperbole and lays out the risks, rewards and responsibilities of using social media for those in regulated industries”, featuring stories from others working in regulated industries who are already participating in the space.

6. David Beats Goliath. As a rapidly expanding startup ourselves, we will always root for the little guys. This session shows how small business can use social media to “level the playing field”, engage with their customer bases, and compete side-by-side with the biggest brands in their industry despite having much smaller traditional advertising budgets to work with.

7. International Olympic Committee | Attracting & Engaging Millennials to Legacy Brands. First, how can you not be excited to attend a session presented by the International Olympic Committee? And second, we’re excited for the prospect of a session focused around the elusive “Millennial” – members of a unique generation that, unlike other targets, are actually growing up with social media. The IOC will share its challenges, insights, and best practices for attracting and exciting this particular audience.

8. UNO Chicago Grill | Using Social Media in Crisis Communications. Aside from the fact that theKbuzz’s Carrie Kerpen is presenting this panel with theKbuzz client Kimberly Boynton, Director of Marketing, Uno Chicago Grill (though really, that should be reason enough to entice you), we think this is a topic of immense interest for any company facing an internal brand, product, or corporate crisis. Some might have reservations about entering the space at such a time for fear of ruining their reputation. But even in the midst of filing Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, Uno managed to get through it and come out on top! Come see us to find out how!

9. Keynote: How Google Builds Its Brand with WOM? Another undeniably amazing brand is presenting its own keynote speech, this time about the important role of word of mouth in its own emergence. In addition to learning how Google did it, attendees will learn more about Google’s products designed to help you run your own word of mouth marketing and measure the results.

10. Ethically Flawed Social Marketing Programs. One of the best sessions I’ve ever attended at an earlier WOMMA conference was a brainstorming session to revise WOMMA’s Code of Ethics. In this session, panel members will be asked to brainstorm and pitch ethically flawed social marketing programs, receiving feedback from MEAP co-chair Patrick Thoburn. This session aims to drive home the values which support the WOMMA Code of Ethics and Disclosure so that all can go forth in social media marketing with knowledge and full confidence in their tactics.

Learn all about these sessions and more about WOMMA’s School of WOM here – we hope to see you all there!

By Jenna Lebel

I had the great opportunity this week to speak at NACStech, the trade show for the National Association of Convenience Stores. The session I spoke at was titled Spreading Your Word with Viral Marketing. It was basically an overview of the social media landscape and details and recommendations on how to enter the space with specific examples from retailers like Cumberland Farms (one of our clients) and Speedway who have implemented successful social media strategies. As you can imagine, it was a popular session. While I’d like to think that the content was the best part, I know it was the Q&A. Once we opened the floor up for questions, the real conversation took place. I’d love to highlight all of the questions (as they were different from the Social Media FAQs I wrote about a few weeks back), but one really stood out. A gentleman stepped up to the podium and asked, “How do I sell my company (upper management, C-level staff) on using social media?” I thought the question was so great that I’m going to share the collective answer here.

Sure we can give numbers showing the effectiveness of traditional marketing versus the effectiveness of social media marketing. We can also give you the cost analysis of each. But the simple answer is that social media provides unique opportunities for companies that traditional marketing  cannot. These include:

Relationship building: With social media, you have two-way communication allowing for a dialogue with current and potential customers. What other medium allows for that? In turn, you’re able to develop and maintain relationships with your audience. Once you form these relationships you can build trust, keep top of mind awareness, increase brand knowledge, increase brand favorability/preference, and the list goes on.

Real-time communication: Whether for crisis communication, reputation management or simple promotion, social media gives you the opportunity to communicate in real time.

Human experience: Sometimes it can be easy for a person to dislike (or even hate) an organization, but it’s much harder for them to dislike John Smith tweeting from inside that organization. Social media allows you to put a face and personality to your organization.

Low Cost Reach: There are 400 million people on Facebook. Twitter has grown to about 75 million users. YouTube is the second largest search engine after Google. And you have access to all of these users! Trying to reach these people through traditional media comes with a hefty price tag attached. Social media gives you a much more cost effective alternative to reaching the masses. And if you’re doing it correctly, you’ll be reaching the right audience for you!

If this doesn’t convince your organization, turn to the case studies and numbers. They speak for themselves.

Do you have anything else that might help convince internal staff? Or have you had an experience where you’ve had to prove the benefits of social media within your organization? Share in the comments section below!

by Kristen Malzone

Epic Change recently launched a campaign called #ToMamaWithLove to honor moms across the globe and to raise funds to invest in one remarkable mama who dreams of building a home for children in her village. Meet Mama Lucy. She is the mother to an entire school in Arusha, Tanzania and it is one of the top-ranked primary schools in her region. Many of the children who would live in this home are the Twitter Kids of Tanzania.

Here are 5 reasons why #ToMamaWithLove rocks:

1. Epic Change is one of the first non-profits to use Facebook’s new social plugins for websites. At ToMamaWithLove.org, you can “Like” the page and instantly share this initiative with Facebook friends.

2. You can pinpoint your mom’s location on their virtual globe. There’s a lot of buzz around location-based social media these days and Epic Change has definitely embraced the opportunity.

3. Every time someone tweets with the hashtag #ToMamaWithLove, OrganicBeautyNow.com will donate $1 (up to $2,000) to Epic Change. Also, some of ToMamaWithLove.org’s sponsors will match your donation. View the entire list of sponsors here.

4. After donating in honor of your mom, you can create a personalized page about her called a heartspace. These pages can include video, pictures, and blurbs about how much you love your mom. Each page also includes social plugins for easy sharing.

5. Our client, 1-800-FLOWERS.COM will be donating $1 to Epic Change for every new follower @1800flowers gets from now through Sunday 5/9 (Mother’s Day) – up to $2,000 total. Anyone who follows @1800flowers during this time will receive a discount code for 15% off on orders placed through Mother’s Day.

So, if you still haven’t found something for Mom yet this Mother’s Day, why not give her the greatest gift of all? Change the world in her honor. Give #ToMamaWithLove.

By Amy Slife

Last week, LinkedIn announced a new feature via their blog — the ability to follow companies. You could chock this up to one more social network jumping on the “Follower” band wagon alongside Facebook and Twitter, but in actuality the implications for job seekers and companies on LinkedIn is huge.

If you’ve been in the market for a new job at any point in time over the past couple of years, chances are you’re probably familiar with searching for jobs by way of social media. Twitter has facilitated the social network job search through tweeting companies like Talent Zoo, various users who aggregate and tweet job listings, plus designated hashtags and the ability to search for key words. It’s simple enough and typically generates a slew of job listings, but LinkedIn has taken the social network job search one step further through the follow company option.

How can company follow help you, the job seeker? With nearly a million company profiles on LinkedIn, from our very own theKbuzz to Pandora, Starbucks or GE, the follow company option allows users to follow a large array of companies. Followers receive notifications to keep track of ongoing developments like hiring and job opportunities or key business developments happening within the company. In fact, LinkedIn even lets you choose what you want to receive notifications about, whether that is new job opportunities, general company profile updates or when employees join the company, leave the company or are promoted within the company. With 65 million users on LinkedIn, this new feature seems to be a great tool for job seekers to keep track of that perfect position or opportunity within their favorite company.

How can this feature help your company? As the LinkedIn blog post on this matter suggests, the follow company option can provide insights for your company as well. For example, if you’re following your competitors, you have a front row seat to see if your brand rivals and local competitors are mass hiring or making company staffing changes. This can signal a wave of growth in your respective industry, or hint at an upcoming issue or crisis in the field.

Overall, the follow company feature is beneficial for both companies and for individual job seekers, and especially appropriate for a social network like LinkedIn which is aiming to garner the shareability of Twitter and Facebook. Do you plan to follow companies on LinkedIn and for what purpose will you use this new feature? Share your thoughts with us!

By Jenna Lebel

The social media world is abuzz with developments from Facebook’s f8 Developer Conference last week. With the unveiling of open graph, like, credits, improved analytics, mobile and more (see full roundup here), there are great things coming (some already there) to Facebook. I was fortunate enough to attend the conference and have a front row seat to a preview of Facebook’s future. We’ve given our analysis of f8 and an in-depth look at what the “like” means for your business, which cover most of the big developments of f8, but there were other smaller developments too. One of the sessions I attended was Focus on Feed. In the session, Facebook’s product and engineering teams discussed the history of the News Feed, their learnings for what makes engaging stories, and ways to use the stream in everyday interactions.

The News Feed only shows a subset of the content or stories generated by your friends and other connections on Facebook. This is to keep you from being overwhelmed as a user. But this means that businesses on Facebook now, more than ever, need to make sure their stories are making the cut. Because of this, news feed optimization (NFO) has arguably become the new SEO.

In the session, we were shown the algorithm that Facebook uses for their news feed. Internally they call the equation EdgeRank (formula pictured here) and it determines which pieces of content make it into the news feed and which pieces don’t. The ranking is based on three factors: the affinity score, the weight of the content, and the time decay.

The formula may be confusing to you so I’ll break down here:

Affinity score: The affinity score is the score between the viewing user and the creator of the piece of content. If you interact with a fan page frequently (view the page, post on the wall, comment and like status updates), that affinity score will be higher than pages that you interact with less.

Weight: The weight of the content is determined by comments, likes, tags, etc. I would assume there is a ranking of these factors (i.e. a comment probably weighs more than a like) though they did not confirm this.

Time Decay: The time decay is pretty straight-forward and is based on how long ago the piece of content was created. A piece of content becomes less important as time passes.

The score you get from multiplying these factors is the EdgeRank. The higher the rank, the higher your chance of your piece of content appearing in the news feed. Similarly, the higher the score, the higher it would appear in the news feed itself. This is not particular surprisingly that the more you interact with someone, the more likely you are to continue to receive their content. But it was interesting to see how they explained the algorithm that determines what makes the cut. And it makes a stronger case for people to develop and create content that will elicit interaction and thus a higher affinity score and weight.

If you weren’t at f8, but would like to watch the session, click here. Go to the “Techniques” sessions, and click on ‘Focus on Feed’ and share your thoughts in the comments section below!

By Amy Slife

With the onslaught of brands utilizing at least one form of social media, the popularity and ease of social media promotions and contests has grown. It can surely be said that social media promotions are here to stay. From a Dentyne promo that incorporated TwitPics and free gum, to becoming a follower to win free food, those following brands on Twitter most likely aren’t strangers to Twitter promotions. But some brands stick out more than others with Twitter promos by taking it to the next level. Below we’ve detailed two great Twitter promos and why they are effective.

JetBlue- JetBlue is no stranger to Twitter.  Along with their main @JetBlue account the brand has a separate second account, @JetBlueCheeps, that is dedicated to detailing cheap last minute flights every Tuesday. But the airline has taken their most recent Twitter promo above and beyond cheap flight notifications. In celebration of JetBlue’s 10^th Birthday, over the next year the airline will be visiting a number of U.S cities to give away tickets. Of course it’s more complicated than just snagging a free ticket, you need to regularly be checking their Twitter account and city-specific hashtag (i.e. #JB10BOS) for the latest instructions on where they’ll be located and what you’ll need to know or bring, like a photo of 10 office items or a state flag for one of their destinations, in order to qualify for a free ticket. And the added challenge, it’s a race amongst your fellow neighbors as the airline has a limited number of tickets to give out at each location. With a successful first run last month in NYC and a stop this month in Boston, where professionals, college students and everyone else in between could be seen running through City Hall Plaza, Copley Plaza and Boston Common, the airline has successfully added a fun and engaging location based scavenger hunt-esque element to their promotions on Twitter.

The Ellen Show- The Ellen Show has added a similar scavenger hunt element to Twitter promos. In an October promo at the University of California San Diego, in which students were alerted to the Twitter game via tweets, students were challenged to bring any kind of corn to one of her staffers at a designated location on the UCSD campus. Five students with a corn product were selected to move on to the next part of the challenge which they would need to complete in less than 15 minutes for a prize. This part of the challenge added a time element along with the scavenger hunt element as the five contestants needed to snap a picture of themselves wearing nothing but a red towel alongside someone in a uniform.

Recently, @TheEllenShow hosted a similar challenge promo in Boston. Weekend tweets began hinting to Bostonians about the upcoming challenge. Followers were eventually instructed to get three items– one each starting with the letters C, V and S, to be creative and to await further instruction via Twitter. @TheEllenShow followers were then instructed to take their three C, V and S items to 207 Market Street, which in turn ended up being a CVS store, and to check in with an Ellen Show staffer, @Jeannieeeee, at 6:00 p.m. Ellen continued to hint at a gift worth thousands. Upwards of 700 people filled the CVS parking, with 10 finalists being selected to enter the store and compete for a $5,000 CVS gift card.

The scavenger hunt style Twitter promo works because it is downright fun and engaging with an interactive element that goes beyond retweets, TwitPics and becoming a follower. Location based promos add an air of exclusivity to those near enough to join in the fun, and a sense of urgency to participate is added when big prizes are guaranteed in limited quantity by two well known brands. JetBlue and The Ellen Show are just two brands that are successfully utilizing scavenger hunt style Twitter promos to engage and reward followers in different locales around the country. Can you think of other brands that have taken their Twitter marketing promotions to the next level? Share them with us!