Should Your Small Business Join Tumblr?

Tumblr has become the Internet’s blog darling, with more than 60 million accounts worldwide. Its users are also highly engaged and eager to interact with compelling content, so it’s no wonder why major brands have flocked to the platform. As a small business owner, those facts might persuade you to quickly switch over, too.

But before hopping on yet another platform, there are a few things to consider, especially if you’re already running an established blog elsewhere.

First of all, platform adoption depends on your initial goal: Are you looking for engagement, awareness and advocacy? How heavily would you rely on Tumblr as a business? Is it an integral source of revenue or data, or more of a place to communicate and engage?

We’ve broken down a few advantages and setbacks to Tumblr from a brand’s perspective. Are you already on Tumblr? What advice do you have for someone considering the platform? Share your tips in the comments.

1. It’s User-Friendly

For any people new to the blogging world, Tumblr is advantageous because it’s so user-friendly. All of the features are apparent in the dashboard, which makes it simple to navigate. You don’t have to fuss around with too many clicks to get to where you want to go, and very little tweaking needs to be made if you’re interested in a customized appearance. Plus, the sleek mobile app means you can update your blog on the fly.

The default theme on Tumblr has more aesthetic freedom than a lot of other blogging platforms, but there are also plenty of pre-packaged themes to choose from — many look less like a blog and more like your own website. Because most are free, Tumblr is a great platform for anyone who can’t afford to hire a designer or developer.

2. It’s More Social

Given that people may be searching the term “Tumblr” on Google more than the word “blog” by the end of 2012, it’s safe to say that popularity is one major advantage for brands.

Tumblr is naturally more social than most blog platforms, and its audience is highly engaged — they will not be shy about interacting with your brand, as long as you provide them with captivating content.

That being said, keep in mind that Tumblr users want to see your brand’s personality. This is nice for many companies because it allows them to be more creative, but can be a challenge for others who aren’t used to thinking outside of the box. If your company is interested in producing interesting content that engages users and doesn’t adhere to the formality of most corporate blogs, then Tumblr is the place for you. In fact, some of the best examples of branded accounts are the ones that break the more corporate mold.

For example, Internet Explorer’s Tumblr has a nontraditional sense of humor, claiming to be the “browser you loved to hate.” Yet, the page is still informational, and it engages the audience by pulling tweets from users who are reluctant to claim approval of the new browser.

3. It’s Categorized

Tumblr’s tag system is categorized into several popular topics: art, tech, education, fashion and advertising, among others.

Depending on what your company does, there’s already a community that’s been filtered. This navigates brands to the right audience, saving time and energy when you want to build a following.

So, let’s say you run a small advertising firm. There’s an “Advertising” tag that’s curated by community managers, and it’s easily accessible and available for you to neatly categorize your blog to target the right audience. There’s no vacuum and no mystery; viewers who are interested in advertising will come to you.

The tag system is useful for brands because if used properly, their content has a chance to be showcased. Plus, if you’re feeling uninspired, the tag dashboard becomes tailored to your area of interest, so you always have relevant content to pull from.

1. There’s a Lack of Analytics

Although you can sync a third-party app like Google Analytics to your Tumblr, there are no features that will reveal Tumblr-specific statistics.

Through referral analytics, brands can know how many people are visiting and sharing the site outside of Tumblr, but a lot of users only interact through their dashboard. As a result, analytics don’t accurately reflect the number of people who interact with your content. For example, if a post gets reblogged 200 times, there’s no way to tell how many people total saw it on the dashboard the way Facebook’s analytics feature can (via “reach”).

You can view Tumblr “notes” (“likes,” reblogs) individually, but that requires a lot of time — especially since the two forms of activity aren’t separated within each post.

2. It’s Unreliable

If Tumblr’s server goes down, it is out of your hands and there’s no way to help ameliorate the situation until the website comes back up. That can be scary, especially if you rely on the platform for ecommerce or to keep the business running. Once the site is back up, the functionality tends to be a little shaky, and it could remain that way for hours or even days.

Over the years, Tumblr has grown from a small community of users to hosting more than 60 million blogs, and stability has been an issue time and again. In 2010, the company had a major issue with its database clusters and the
site was down for more than 14 hours as a result of this instability.

Thanks to the platform’s fast growth, the company has expanded its servers and support team. The site has yet to experience an outage like in 2010, but it’s an important consideration for businesses.

3. There’s a Lack of Native Comment Functionality

Tumblr is one of the most social blogging platforms, but there is no native commenting system.

Users can message blogs, send “fan mail” or ask questions, but that is at the brand’s discretion to allow, and there’s no way to comment on an individual post without a third-party app.

Alternatively, the brand can ask followers questions, but there’s a specific post format for that. Another way to get around it is ending a post with a question mark — on the edit page, a box will appear at the right that opens the post for commentary.

So, Now What?

In short, if you’re looking for an aesthetically pleasing, user-friendly way to outreach and engage, then Tumblr is a fairly good platform for you to do so.

However, if you need control of data and rely on a blog for your business to run as a whole, it might be safer to hire a professional or develop your own website. You could then use Tumblr as an additional platform and still interact with its highly engaged audience.

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Everything You Need to Run a Successful Social Media Contest

So you want to run a contest on social media, eh? Not sure where to start? Which social network is the most appropriate choice? If you're even allowed to run a contest there?

There are so many rules and guidelines, so much planning and preparation involved, that we thought a blog post was really required to explain how to run a contest that delivers a solid return on investment. Who knows -- it could be the best tactic you’ve ever introduced to grow your reach, drive site traffic, and generate leads! Here's how you can set yourself up for success with contests on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram.

How to Run a Contest on Facebook

Follow the Rules

Before you start your Facebook contest, make sure you can actually run it legally. Facebook has cracked down on contests due to liability issues, so read through their strict rules ahead of time. For example, did you know that you can’t use liking or commenting on a post, checking in, connecting to your app, or uploading a photo to your Timeline as a contest entry mechanism? Did you know that you can’t notify winners of your contest through Facebook -- whether through messages, chat, or posts on their profile? Did you know that you can't even use Facebook features as a voting mechanism?

What I'm trying to say is read their contest rules before you get started -- but in general, you can assume you're responsible for the legal and logistical portions of your contest; Facebook just provides the people. To learn more about Facebook’s contest rules, visit their Page Guidelines.

Make Use of Third Party Apps

The most common and effective way for getting around Facebook’s contest rules is by using third party apps -- some good ones are ShortStack, Woobox, and Offerpop. You might remember the days before Facebook Timeline, when brands had welcome pages and like-gating mechanisms. Well, technically these features still exist; they’re just buried within likes, photos, videos, and events. With this said, make sure you’re properly promoting your contest so people can actually find it! I highly suggest posting about your contest (including the link for where to find it) and pinning that post to the top of your Timeline. Just take a look at how Dunkin' Donuts is doing it on their Timeline:

Include CTAs to Drive Traffic to Your Website

If you’re using a third party app for your contest, including calls-to-action is a piece of cake! In this example with Dunkin' Donuts' Get SanDDwich’d contest, you can see two very obvious CTAs -- “Enter Now” and “View Gallery.” If you want to achieve something similar, simply come up with the design, upload it using your third party app, and drag and drop your links over the correct piece of the image. Really, it’s not hard. I promise. Just remember to use contest-specific tracking tokens for your links so you know who’s clicking. If you don’t have access to a designer and need help with your CTAs, take a look at our free ebook: Mastering the Design & Copy of Calls-to-Action.

Include a Form on the App Page to Generate Leads

If your goal is to generate leads from your contest, you might want to include a form directly on your third party app. This will make the process much easier for people trying to register for the contest. Avoid making your entrants dig through mountains of rules or a maze of landing pages to get to where they want to go. Include your Official Rules in the form of a link in the body of your contest explanation. Which brings me to my next topic ...

Create Your Own Terms & Conditions / Official Rules Page

Facebook makes it very clear that you must provide the official terms, rules, and eligibility requirements for your contest. You need to “include a complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant and include acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.” In addition, it is important to provide disclosure information -- that if the participant is filling out a form and giving you personal information, that information is going to you and not to Facebook.

Notify the Winner Via Your Website

Since you’re not allowed to notify your winner via Facebook, why not use this as an opportunity to drive traffic to your website? Explain in the rules for your contest that the winner will be announced on such and such a day on a specific location on your website. If you include relevant calls-to-action for compelling offers around the announcement, you’re bound to generate some leads.

Give Away Something Awesome

If you’re going through the trouble of creating a third party app and getting lawyers involved, you better be giving away something really good. If you’re making people fill out a form, tell a story about their first experience with your brand, or explain why they love your product, you’re not going to get many entrants if you’re giving away a lousy keychain. If you have an amazing prize, people are more likely to put some serious effort into your contest. Just look at Dunkin' Donuts -- they're giving away a beach vacation! Yeah, I'd upload a picture for that.

Remember Your Goals and Measure Your Results

You can create the most impressive contest in the world, but if it doesn't align with your goals or if you didn’t measure it correctly, who really cares? If you want to generate leads from your contest, for example, you know you need to include a form and calls-to-action on your contest page. If you're looking to build reach and brand awareness, make entrants share your brand or contest page on their Facebook Timeline. And how will you know if you generated leads or grew your reach? Well, Facebook Insights can let you know how much your reach has grown, or you can invest in closed-loop marketing software to track the number of leads generated and the growth of your reach.

How to Run a Contest on Twitter

Follow the Rules

When you’re running a contest, just like any day on Twitter, make sure you’re following The Twitter Rules. Discourage dishonest behavior such as the creation of multiple accounts or posting the same tweet repeatedly. However, do encourage good behavior such as topic relevance and creativity! Your entrants must also comply with applicable laws and regulations -- Twitter makes it clear that this portion is your responsibility. In other words, you write the official rules, and any legal backlash will be your problem, not Twitter’s. I highly suggest you consult with an attorney if you have any questions or concerns with this.

Set Your Goals

If you don't know what you’re looking to achieve with the contest, how will you know if you’ve achieved it? Plus, your goals will help you figure out how to run the contest. If you’re looking to promote a specific event or offer, for example, have your entrants tweet a link to it; just make sure you’re using tracking tokens to measure your leads and clicks to see exactly how successful the contest was. If you are trying to improve reach, on the other hand, have entrants retweet the original tweet you sent out about the contest. And if you’re looking to build awareness of your brand, require your entrants to follow you in order to be eligible.

Words With Friends@WordsWFriends

Hey Word Nerds! RT to win a $50 Game Card! One winner a week, winner chosen on Fridays, contest ends 7/1 #ZyngaLove50

26 Jun 12

• Reply
• Retweet
• Favorite

Iron Out the Details

Do you want to run a sweepstakes-style contest? How about a caption or creative answer contest? Or perhaps a photo contest would make the most sense. There are several types of contests you could choose from, so make sure you pick one that aligns with (all together now) your goals. You also need to figure out when the contest will take place, for how long it will run, and then the announcement of the contest will take place -- will it be days before via your blog and other social media networks, or just minutes before the contest? But once you have your goals set, details like these are the easy part!

Find a Way to Filter

It’s impossible to honestly select a winner for a contest if you can’t find and weed through all the submissions. Make sure you set yourself up for success by creating streams specifically dedicated to the contest. When tweeting the announcement that you’re having a contest, ask users to include either an @mention to you in their tweet, or a specific hashtag dedicated to the contest or campaign you’re running at the time. This way you can clearly see all the entrants, making your life much easier when time comes to select a winner.

Measure Your Results

If you're a regular reader of this blog, you know how important measurement is to, well, anything you do. It's how you know how successful you are, after all! Track your contest hashtag over time using a third party app, use a contest-specific bit.ly link, drive traffic to your landing page, and view the source of that traffic (all that Twitter traffic!) using an analytics platform or your marketing software.

How to Run a Contest on Pinterest

Follow Proper Pin Etiquette

Unlike Facebook and Twitter, Pinterest doesn’t provide any official rules or guidelines for running contests. They do, however, provide suggestions for respectfully using the site with their Pin Etiquette Guide. If you’re looking for a more in-depth guide on the rules of Pinterest, take a look at their Terms & Privacy page, but in a nutshell: be respectful, authentic, and create contest rules that reflect that. This contest from Garnet Hill, for example, falls right in line with what pinners love to do!

Make an Announcement

Leverage those social networks! Don’t just announce that you’re having a contest on Pinterest, tell your followers on Twitter, your fans on Facebook, and your circles on Google+, too! Depending on the length of the contest, you should make social promotion of it a regular part of your social media updating to encourage participation.

Clearly Articulate the Rules of the Contest

What should be included in your photo/description to tell users what is required to enter the contest? Do you want people to create a whole new board for your contest, like Garnet Hill? Should they simply repin one image? Let participants know so they can follow your rules properly. Include a bullet point list of the rules right on a repinnable image. Behind the image, include a link to more details about your contest using a landing page on your website. And hey, guys, did you remember the tracking token? How else will you know the number of leads your contest generates, or the all-mighty click-through rate? And don't forget, as with any other social media contest, you have to ...

Remember Your Goals and Measure Your Results

What are you trying to achieve with this contest? Do you want more leads? Awareness that your brand does, in fact, have a Pinterest account? Tailor your contest to suit your goals and measure your results accordingly. For example, if you are looking to generate leads and you could care less about engagement, why are you measuring reach? If you align your goals and metrics with your contest, you'll be much more successful in the long-run.

Find a Way to Filter

Use a hashtag so people can follow the contest entries on Pinterest. This will help spread the word about your contest, and it can also help you find participants. If you’re requiring entrants to create a board for your contest, have them use a pre-defined hashtag on their images so it's easy to find. Or are they simply repinning the original contest image? That’s easy -- just click on the pin to see who repinned it!

Have a Prize Your Audience Will Love

If participants are creating an entire board on their Pinterest account dedicated to your company, you’ll need to give away something really awesome. The more effort your participants need to put in, the better the prize should be. You will get fewer participants with a contest giving away a koozie than a contest giving away an entire bedroom set. Plus, a prize like a beautiful new bedroom set plays right into the interests of Pinterest users -- beautiful, visual items.

Announce the Winner Via Your Website

Unlike Facebook, there is no problem with you contacting a user on Pinterest to let them know they’ve won your contest. However, it might be beneficial to you if you announce the winner on your website if you're looking to generate leads. This way you get more eyes on awesome website content that can convert into leads for your business, instead of just notifying one person. But you should certainly publicize the winner and their board on your website and your Pinterest account for some great PR!

How to Run a Contest on Instagram

Follow Best Practices

Much like Pinterest, Instagram doesn’t have any official contest rules on their site. They do, however, suggest best practices for “How to Host a Photo Contest on Instagram” in their company blog. Notes include posting frequently, giving the contest time, spreading the word about the contest, using the Instagram API, and giving away prizes.

Set Your Goals and Clearly Articulate the Rules

Your goals should be directly correlated with how you run your contest. Want to drive traffic to your website? Make participants go there! Want to boost engagement? Make them leave a comment! You are the owner of your contest, so only you get to decide what is required for entry. Use this power to your advantage!

Make an Announcement

Photos on Instagram fly through the feed so quickly, you might have trouble being successful with only one contest announcement. But you have fans and followers on other networks, right? Promote the contest on your website and other social networks to get as many participants as possible! You can certainly post about the contest multiple times if you keep it creative and always craft unique updates.

Follow a Theme

Are you currently running a campaign that you want your contest to run alongside of? Follow the same theme! Your Instagram followers are certainly a creative bunch, so even if you’re a B2B company, they will find a way to add excitement to your brand. Trust me. For example, GE ran a contest on Instagram using the hashtag #geinspiredme. After the contest, they featured the top photos as a board on their Pinterest account.

Find a Way to Filter

Using a hashtag, like GE did, is a great way to filter your contest. However, if you get thousands of submissions, it might be tough to weed through them all. So in addition to the hashtag, try filtering with an RSS feed. Webstagram allows you to search a hashtag, and you can view every Instagram photo using this tag with the original caption and comments. Take a look at how it works with GE as an example.

Measure Your Results

Statigram is a great site for management, measurement, and promotion on Instagram. And lucky for you, it even has a "Contest" section with a toolkit for running photo contests. Does it get any more convenient than that? Now that you have all the tools working for you, match your measurement tactics with your goals and rules and you should be a breeze!

Announce the Winner Via Your Website

Instagram isn’t exactly a broadcast platform, so it’s a bit more difficult for contacting and announcing a winner for your contest. Instead, try creating a landing page showcasing those fun, creative photo submissions with the winner clearly set apart from the rest. You should also make sure to have calls-to-action on your landing page that are relevant to your contest -- with a relevant offer to back it up and generate some serious leads. Of course, only do this if it’s a part of your goals. ;-)

Article Courtesy Of Hubspot Media
Read more: http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/33352/Everything-You-Need-to-Run-a-Successful-Social-Media-Contest.aspx#ixzz1za4epThf


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Social media gives customers a louder voice

Social media is rapidly evolving and with the recent announcement that Twitter has been enhanced to ensure it is “optimsed for speed”, it is vital for organisations to actively engage and manage their social media presence. Millions of customers now have instant access to their social media accounts at their fingertips, making it easier than ever for them to vent their frustration about an organisation’s bad service.

It is understandable that every organisation will at some point experience a broken process, technical glitch or unfortunate moment due to human error. The challenge is to ensure potential risks or mistakes are identified early enough to avoid them becoming a customer service issue.

In the past, companies had a significant window of opportunity to analyse and address potential faults before they became a threat to brand reputation. Today’s new social customers, however, are quick and often unforgiving. The collective voice of unsatisfied consumers can strike back with lightning speed and sometimes with detrimental results. The key to staying ahead of the game is to have a handle on how to identify your next customer tipping point and then, more importantly, knowing when and in what ways to respond.

Staying Proactive When Things Go Awry

Some potential pitfalls as businesses grow can be avoided if you heed the lessons others have picked up along the way. The following summarises several customer service blunders, each of which resulted in a backlash of negative customer feedback and media coverage.

Sudden Price Increase Upsets Customers

After announcing a significant price increase, many loyal customers cancelled their service and responded to the change via social media. The Internet subscription service apologised, but the request for forgiveness was drowned out further by a decision to tier its offerings. As a result, this brand felt the impact of losing dedicated customers. These decisions could have potentially been handled more carefully by incorporating insights from a panel of existing customers to flush out the various options and how to communicate the rationale behind them in a clear manner before the changes were launched to the broad scale market.

Drastic Logo Change Tests Customer Loyalty

A leading retailer announced its new branding and then abruptly withdrew the decision only a few days later. In what amounts to a corporate mea culpa, the company posted a message to its Facebook account saying, “OK¾we heard loud and clear that you don’t like the new logo.” The company reintroduced the original branding, and in doing so, deserves credit for moving swiftly to respond to customer reaction. This could lead you to wonder how many customers it ran the new logo by before the launch. No doubt, some focus groups were conducted, but this particular example proves that a much larger, unbiased sample across different segments could have made a difference.

New Product Causes Service Issues  

After releasing a new mobile phone, customers experienced constant dropped calls. This technology innovator, however, didn’t respond to the numerous requests and red flags it received for an entire week, because its research showed that only half of one percent of users actually encountered the problem. The voices posted on the social networks proved otherwise, so the company offered a free accessory to millions of buyers. Identifying the situation earlier could have saved all kinds of headaches on both sides.

Letting Customers Be Your Guide

It’s important to realise that customers who are already loyal to your products and services tend to be forgiving¾to a degree. That said, you can’t take them for granted. That’s where a Voice of the Customer (VoC) strategy can come into play—helping identify key customer issues early and arming an organisation with the intelligence they need, saving time, resources and brand image.

Today’s forward-thinking organisations are starting to take a more proactive approach through a centralised means of detecting, gathering, analysing and acting on insights from their VoC programmes. And in doing so, they are reaping such benefits as:

Monitoring and detecting unforeseen trends: It can be hard to anticipate what may prompt customer frustration. That’s because it’s not always based on a move you make, and could be something your competitor or government initiated. Usually, the first voices come from unstructured sources, such as phone calls into the contact centre, emails or postings on social networks. Some speech analytics and text analytics technologies can monitor a near unlimited set of words and phrases across these channels and provide critical “early warning” signals when a new issue is becoming more prevalent. The unstructured sources can also provide a “virtual focus group” of thousands or millions of consumers, helping determine important concerns worthy of exploring.

Managing consumer panels: Offer some of your most loyal customers an opportunity to participate in panels or feedback discussions. This can be a great platform for testing corporate changes before rolling out to a wider customer base and experiencing a backlash that could have been avoided.

Seeking ongoing and “actionable” feedback: Companies need to get smarter about how they survey customers. It is important to start by assessing all the existing information you have about customers, so you don't end up asking what you already know.

Taking action: Arguably the most important aspect of a VoC programme is being proactive around customer insights and requests, and communicating your actions back to the consumer. This not only helps build loyalty and gives customers a reason to provide feedback in the future, but also lets them know you’re listening and that you care. Successful VoC programmes are enterprise-wide and typically run by senior executives that can integrate different departments that interface and impact consumers.

Armed with real and recent customer interaction insights¾which include likes and dislikes, requests and questions - organisations can make more informed decisions and craft the right responses to defuse, or even ride, the social wave. Some of these issues may even turn into lucrative opportunities for customers and the business alike. In this way, marketing, product development and other customer-impacting groups in the enterprise can be more proactive, more informed and better positioned to anticipate what’s coming and put their best foot forward.

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