I don’t really like give-aways and competitions. I think they are incredibly mainstream, and I don’t do mainstream very well. I do Storyliving very well indeed.
I constantly deal with competitions in social media as a tool for content marketing, because competitions have become the commodity on the internet. That is the first thing you can think of when it comes to involving people in your brand on social media: competitions.
‘Giving people cake’
I’m biased as I write this because I know that a lot of companies out there are trying to grasp the social media and win over more and more people to like them, involve them, engage them, follow them around like puppy dogs, digging what they do, making them into a cool company and brand. Adding them to an ever-growing community.
However, my idealistic, outsider-ish self says that it becomes too much of a commodity for the public to sell their personal Facebook identity – and their network to win a competition on a Facebook page. You are giving these companies permission to be right in your center of attention as well as those around you: the newsfeed! My dismay is not the competition in itself. Heck sometimes I, myself even enter and win stuff (and I’m happy when I do!). My point is that;
- It’s filling up my newsfeed on Facebook. I evangelize that with social media you have a hands-on tool to save the world for the better, and you decide to earn your own fame instead, by doing Facebook competitions? What happened to storyliving ? aka. When you, in addition to telling the story (storytelling), document it on the social web?
- It is filling up my RSS reader – the place I turn to daily to get my ladies magazine kick and getting to know what smart people think about business.
- Competitions are so widely successful that it is the ONLY thing that a lot of companies do on Facebook to involve