Jugnoo Social Advisor: Don’t Serve SPAM – Keep Your Promotions Fresh

When you have a hot promotion on the go, it can be pretty tempting to broadcast it all day over every channel – and why not? Your customers are getting a great deal, and you’re getting great customers. But you know how those annoying infomercials that take over your television every day make you change the channel?

If you aren’t careful, your well-intentioned messaging can turn into the Slap Chop overnight. You need to take care with spreading your own message too frequently, or carelessly, to ensure your customers aren’t tuning you out – or worse – unfollowing you entirely.

How do you find that delicate balance between making sure your message is received without veering into the dreaded ‘spam’ category? Here are some tips on making sure your social audience is getting only the prime cuts of your new promotion, without anything canned about it.

• Find the right frequency for your channel. Unfortunately, there’s no hard and fast rule for how often is too often on any of the social platforms – it can be a matter of intuition in the beginning. Consider your promotion: if it’s a weekend deal, advertising closer to the end of the week may be more effective, for instance. Also consider the nature of the platform you’re on: use Twitter to promote more often, for instance. Your followers may follow a large number of brands and users, so their feed possibly has thousands of tweets, making it easy for your message to get lost, but also making it easier to promote frequently.

• Look to the leaders. Check out your favourite brands and see how often they update. How do you feel about that frequency for your own products – does it feel like too much, or too little? When do you start to feel like you’re being spammed? Sometimes you need a little guidance – after all, there isn’t a formula for frequency – and looking to the pros can help you determine what’s right for you.

• Use metrics to promote effectively.  It’s not about how often you promote; it’s how effectively you do it. You can get away with tweeting a promotion once a week if that one tweet has the highest impact. Look at your highest click-through rates, for instance, or the number of retweets and shares and try to determine what made that post so popular. Was it the time of day? Or maybe how it was worded? Attempting to reproduce these successes will help your promotions reach a wider audience. Metrics can also tell you who’s helping you spread your message – perhaps you’ll find that the same people retweet or share every day; consider what you can do to leverage, and reward, these brand advocates. Your metrics can show you when your promotions are at their most effective, and when your efforts are missing the mark.

• Encourage your customers to share. It’s not only exciting to have users to share on your behalf – it means that they like your products and your promotion – but it avoids the spamming issue altogether. It’s an ideal scenario; allowing you to market your deal, increasing your audience while your message spreads through their networks, and you avoid the risk of spamming their channels with your promotion… because they want to share it.

• Use a call-to-action and ask your followers to share, or perhaps offer them something of value; an additional discount for retweeting, or a bonus gift-with-share, for instance. Or make your promotion visually exciting, using JugnooMe’s Facebook coupon app, or creating a graphic to upload to Twitpics – anything to make it compelling, and easy to share.

• Continue to offer more. If you’re worried about spamming your customers, just remember to keep sharing other content, too. Stagger your promotion amongst other articles and interesting links – this will ensure you’re not flooding your channels and irritating your customers, and it will also encourage them to keep coming back to you… which may mean that they tune in just in time to see your afternoon post about your new special!

Finding that balance between effectively promoting your newest offering and spamming your followers can be a difficult one to find. But if you share at the best times, encourage your users to share on your behalf, and also provide interesting, non-promotional content in the meantime, you’ll keep your offerings fresh and way more appealing to your customers than spam.