As I head off to watch the finals of the GRA/TAG Business Launch 2009 this morning I wanted to share with you the tactics that Balaya used to be the leading vote getter in the People’s Choice Contest, and boy did they earn it. Balaya’s win was no accident, but a well thought out social media marketing plan. The tactics employed by Balaya are transferable to many different social media marketing situations and Seth Michalak was kind enough to share them.
- The customized TinyURL tinyurl.com/vote-for-number-16 was created as a reference URL to be used in many of their tactics. Nice.
- Using the Balaya blog they pointed out the contest not once, but twice and asked people to not only vote for them but to pass the message among friends.
- Through use of the multiple Twitter accounts members of the Balaya team regularly posted the TinyURL link to the voting page and encouraged individuals to vote and re-tweet.
- They sent an email to a large list of individuals who have supported Balaya, asking for their votes, as well as asking them to pass the info along to their address books. Many people did so. One individual passed the email to 300 people, another did an additional 150 and many who sent it to about 50 more people.
- Balaya did a lot on Facebook . Using status messages, members of the Balaya team posted the TinyURL and asked individuals to vote. They had many friends and supporters who followed suit, and used status messages to do the same. Balaya had a great supporter create a Facebook event group for the competition. Invites to this group probably exceeded 1,000 total users during the duration of the competition. You can see an image of the Facebook page below.
- Members of the Balaya team also used the “What are you working on?” field on LinkedIn to promote the TinyURL and encourage voting.
- Messages about the competition and the TinyURL were posted to many groups using Balaya’s primary product, tick-it, a desktop ticker style communication tool.
- Balaya posted a description of the competition and a link on their website.
- Balaya enlisted ‘The Creative Coast Alliance,’ an arm of the Savannah Economic Development Authority, to include a request for votes and a link to the contest in their monthly e-newsletter that is delivered to a large mailing list in the Savannah area.
- And finally good old world networking. Balaya asked people to vote in the different offices they were in and around during the course of the competition.
It’s a long list, but no one ever said this social media marketing stuff was easy. But hopefully, some of the tactics that Balaya used to win the People’s Choice Contest can be used by many startups to help grow their business down the road.