VISIONARY - Music Inc. Magazine

Getting 104,048 views
on Facebook with less
than 5 minutes of work
44 I MUSIC INC. I JULY 2011
TECHNOLOGY I BY CRIS BEHRENS
Social Media Coup
I’ve found that Internet advertising and social media sites are
practically the only way to motivate potential customers to get
off their duffs and visit our store. With this in mind, I recently
began searching for more creative, alternative ways to advertise.
It started with researching the number of visits to our website
and Facebook page. And what I found surprised me.
In the span of a little over a month, there were 39,000 post
views and 1,080 “likes” (i.e. fans) on the Summerhays
Music Facebook page, compared to roughly 770
visits to our site. Clearly, Facebook had a wealth of
untapped opportunities.
So, I set off to get more Facebook “likes” by taking
advantage of its latest addition: the Question
feature. This lets you poll Facebook friends, family
and future customers on any topic you want. Hoping
to generate excitement and get feedback from our
biggest, most important group — students and school
music directors — we created a poll just for them.
We posted a comment on the poll explaining how
the contest worked. Simply put, users were to vote
for their schools. The school that had the most votes
won the grand prize, and any school with more than
100 votes received a $100 store credit for its band
and orchestra program. The poll was open to
anyone who’d “liked” Summerhays Music on
Facebook, and we sent an e-mail with a link
to the poll to every band and orchestra direc-
tor in the state.
Three weeks later, we tallied 615 new “likes,”
104,048 post views, 17,795 votes, 326 comments/followers
and 190 schools participating.
And the numbers continued to rise.
MORE FRIENDS IN 5 MINUTES
Oftentimes, the value of having Facebook
“fans” and followers isn’t given the credit
it deserves. This one poll led to 104,048 post views on our page,
putting our primary website to shame. Numerous hours have been
spent making our company website as complete, attractive and
helpful as possible. The Facebook poll, on the other hand, took
less than 5 minutes to create and generated invaluable comments
and feedback that aren’t possible to generate with a website. Every
K–12 student made known his or
her school would win, and every
time a person had a comment, his
or her friends saw our company
name on their news feeds.
The one disadvantage of Facebook
polls is they only allow for
100 maximum options. We were
forced to add a second poll to our
page. This made keeping track
of votes and duplicates tricky,
but most polls don’t need to be
this complicated. You don’t even
need giveaways to make a poll
work. People take polls every day
on topics ranging from favorite
colors to favorite ’80s movies,
causing the poll to appear on
their friends’ news feeds —
encouraging them to vote, too.
WEBSITES AREN’T DEAD
This isn’t to say company websites
and other forms of advertising
are obsolete. Our website
still contributed 770 customer
views in one month — a number
not to be ignored. Facebook offers
several easy, free ways to advertise
to complement everything
else you’ve been doing online.
The information superhighway
isn’t going anywhere, and
social media sites continue growing.
As music retailers, we have
two options: We can let the Internet
take over and be the death of
retail as we know it, or we can
flip the tables and use it to live
in the fast lane. MI
Cris Behrens is the manager of
Summerhays Music in Murray, Utah.