The holiday season is here! This means a lot of opportunities for holiday-themed marketing campaigns with special offers, sales, discounts, and lots of fun. And if you are utilizing social media to its fullest, you may also expect a spike in fans and followers. Whether your page manages to generate 1,000 or 10,000 fans, it’s a great occasion for celebration you shouldn’t miss out on.
Show your followers how you appreciate them
They took their time to like your page on Facebook, follow you on Twitter and Instagram, maybe even post something or like and share your content. Do something in return to show your appreciation and build goodwill. But no matter what you decide to do, make it exclusive to the social media platform that hit the milestone. So if you have 5,000 followers on Twitter, don’t brag about it on Facebook – address your Twitter following via their chosen medium.
How to Celebrate Milestones with Your Fans
Add a milestone to timeline
If you are celebrating your Facebook fan following, add the milestone to Facebook timeline. Depending on how fast your page is growing, determine which milestones you want to add. Of course, if the page grows by 1000 fans a week, celebrating each one would be too much. However, one milestone every few months sounds reasonable.
Make a collage
You don’t need a special occasion to do that, but I figured it fits very well with the fan appreciation theme. The idea is to make a collage of your follower’s profile pictures or Twitter handles and share it with them. On Facebook, you can set such a collage as a cover photo for everyone to see. You can even encourage fans to find themselves in a picture and tag. Of course, this involves a few hours of cyber stalking and data collecting, but the end result should be worth the labor. Take a look at this piece of art cover photo by Dave Lang for the Baltimore Ravens’ page:
If it’s a big milestone, such as 100,000 fans, and your resources permit, make a custom video addressing your fans. You can even get someone to write a song, like Nestlés’ Drumstick did for their 1 million Facebook fans. They sang about all the various locations their fans come from and even called out a few by names (real names or not – we’ll never know unless these folks step forward). Keep it short, light and funny.
Give something away
Everyone loves to win, so why not sponsor a giveaway to cheer up your fans and maybe get some new ones too. There is a sea of possibilities when it comes to commemorative giveaways. Generally, it’s a good idea to choose your own product or service as a prize, because that’s the reason you’ve got so many fans, right? (we hope you didn’t buy them). Of course, if you think that’s not grand enough, you can throw in a few iPads as a Grand Prize – you can’t go wrong with those.
A common approach to celebrating milestones with giveaways is building anticipation. You can announce that upon reaching a specific fan count like 10,000 or even every 5,000 you will be giving a certain number of prizes away. This will both build excitement and get your fan base to grow faster.
Create an exclusive offer
If you don’t want to bother setting up and managing a prize giveaway, simply create an offer that your fans will be able to use at check out in your store or online.
- Be generous: make it an offer worth taking, such as BOGO or a free item with a low minimum purchase. You don’t have to run it for a long time – anywhere between 24 hours and two days is plenty of time for your most devoted fans to act upon it.
- Make it exclusive: once again, make it look like you are giving your fans some insider information. Share it just once and with the selected audience.
- Be original: check out this unique human coupon Old Navy came up with to celebrate their 5 million Facebook milestone.
Of course, bigger companies like Porsche and Aston Martin have, what seems like, unlimited budgets to spend on various publicity stunts, but don’t get discouraged just yet. With a small budget and a team of creative thinkers you can come up with something newsworthy and even sensational. And of course, there is no shame in borrowing ideas from others as long as you provide original execution:
– Aston Martin celebrated millionth Facebook fan by designing a custom car based on fans’ input. You can do the same with your product or service: ask fans for their feedback and create a fan-favorite version of whatever you sell.
– Cadbury built a huge Facebook-style thumbs-up statue out of their chocolate. You can use your own products or manpower (like Old Navy did) to construct something. It doesn’t have to be big, but as long as you put your soul into it, your fans will appreciate.
– Heineken blew up a balloon for each one of their Facebook fans until the office got filled with balloons. You can also do something similar like donating to charity for every fan.
Want to know how other big brands celebrated their fan-related milestones? Take a look here. Need help coming up with ideas or coordinating your social media efforts? Just let us know and we’ll be happy to give you advice or do the work for you. And remember, as long as you say “Thank You” and acknowledge your fans’ contributions, they will be happy.