Taking a Note from the Pros: How Retail Giants Channel Halloween Sales through Social Media
Image via Flickr by Paxton Holley
If you’ve been using social media sites at all during the month of October, you’ve undoubtedly come across promotions from all the big retailers. Target and Wal-Mart are running Halloween-themed contests, Party City is posting coupons and all the big sellers are joining in on the fray. How can you use their strategies to boost your own traffic and sell yourself more successfully?
Encouraging Debate
Image via Flickr by betherann
Wal-Mart created a big stir on their Facebook page by pitting various candies against each other in mock contests. The retail giant invited users to sound off on their choice, and the page lit up with comments. Will it help Wal-Mart sell more candy this season? The corporation is certainly banking on just that. Space for candy treats has been increased up to 20 percent in Wal-Marts all over the United States in anticipation of high sales on sugar goods.
Halloween is definitely a celebration of candy, but posting pictures of treats isn’t all that exciting. By finding a way to encourage discussion about candy, Wal-Mart made their Facebook page more popular and they may even get some extra sales of the sweet stuff, to boot.
Making it Easy
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Wal-Mart made the contests work by asking users to “like” one choice and “share” the post to make the other choice. It’s an important part of the strategy. All they had to do was push a single button and that made it easy for Facebookers to vote on their favorite choice.
Always make it easy for your users to engage in your various promotions. The more extra steps you add, the fewer results you’re going to get.
Using Social Media
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How else can you take a page out of the big retail book of success? There are lots of ways to get people to engage in your social media promotions.
Ask
People love sharing opinions on social media. Target allows fans of their social media pages to create different costume options. They built an app allowing costume-creators to poll their friends and family to vote on different picks. Encourage this sort of sharing to encourage conversation. That will drive more traffic to your pages, and that will allow more people to see your brand.
Contests
Everyone loves a little healthy competition. Use Twitter to set up a Hashtag contest. Dunkin’ Donuts used the #carveDD hashtag to promote a contest they ran in 2011 offering $50 gift cards to five winners who posted photos of their own carved pumpkins.
Vote by Tweet
Get people to vote. Maybe you’ll use Halloween to unveil a new theme for your blog, or pick a new category for the blog, or determine which color of a certain product you’ll sell – whatever. By getting followers to vote on Twitter and Facebook, you’ll get yourself more followers. They’ll be sharing and re-tweeting the contest, and others will chime to add their opinion as well.
Wow Them
Today’s Internet is highly visual. Casual ‘Net surfers are drawn to graphics, moving images and the pretty, colorful stuff they can see. Halloween is a perfect time to display dazzling pictures of decorations, costumes, pumpkins and edibles. Interesting pictures encourage sharing and commenting, and that drives traffic.
Building Anticipation
Image via Flickr by feltedfolksies999
Don’t forget the most important trick of all: make users feel special. Lots of retail giants offer the promise of exclusivity to their followers to sweeten their promotions. By presenting something that’s for followers only, something available nowhere else, you create the illusion of exclusivity and you make the promotion feel special and elite.
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Social media now a days plays important role.