Types of Promotions on Facebook and Instagram: 10 Tips for Increasing Audience Reach

Promotions are an excellent marketing tool that can help solve several important business tasks without leaving the virtual space.

For example:

• Increase the number of followers of a community or business page — expand the base of potential customers.
• Warm up the audience, win their loyalty, and nudge them toward purchases.
• Show a large number of people the company's new product.

Promotions on social media are working with a very large audience, attracting which isn't too expensive.

The audience is, indeed, enormous.

In January 2020, more than 4.5 billion people used the internet, and the number of social media users surpassed the 3.8 billion mark.

That's roughly every second inhabitant of Earth — impressive, isn't it?

The main social networks whose promotions we're discussing today are Facebook and Instagram.

Where are all the customers? Where there's traffic. Want SEOquick to bring it to you?

Paid search advertising is a fast way to get customers to your website here and now.

Let us set up a Google AdWords campaign for you, relevant to your business.

And you'll only pay for the impressions and clicks that bring a target audience to the site.

Book a call

What reach is and why you should increase it

What the difference is between follower reach and total reach.

How reach is connected to traffic.

Why it's definitely worth bothering to increase this metric.

Reach is the number of social network users who will see a promotion or any other publication of yours in their feed.

There are two more concepts: follower reach and total reach.

Follower reach is the number of those people who already know about your company, are subscribed to you, and will see the publication within 24 hours.

Total reach is obtained if you add to the followers all the new people who will also see the post (if it gets shared, of course) within 24 hours.

The higher the total reach figure, the higher the probability of getting good traffic to your community or business page.

Traffic, together with customer loyalty, brand awareness, and final sales, is the main goal of running promotions.

That's exactly why it's definitely worth working hard on increasing reach.

Do you need sales?

Fill out the form below and I'll help you set up a paid-search sales channel to your website!

7 main types of promotions for Facebook and Instagram

How a contest differs from a discount promotion.

What "exclusive for followers" means.

How to use promotional cross-marketing profitably.

It's all in this chapter.

The main types of promotions for social media include exclusives for followers, lotteries, promotions with coupons and discounts, contests, bonus promotions, promotions across both social networks at once, and promotional cross-marketing.

They all work; there are no clear leaders or outsiders among them — the choice of promotion type depends on the situation, on the field of activity, and on the specific task the company sets for itself.

Let's talk about each type in more detail.

Type 1. Exclusive for followers

This type of promotion for Facebook and Instagram assumes that only current followers of the community/page/group participate.

The goal of an exclusive for followers is to stimulate a "warm" audience to make a purchase here and now.

For this, promo codes, special prices for followers, or the chance to be the first to order a new item that appeared in the range only yesterday (or, better, only today) are used.

A feature of an exclusive for followers is that the promotion isn't duplicated in real life, for example, in the company's offline store. ONLY for our own. ONLY for followers. ONLY on social media.

The emotional effect such a promotion gives — followers feel special, somehow chosen.

It's pleasant and nicely flatters their ego. And at the same time it raises the value of your page in followers' eyes and warms up their loyalty.

That's why promotions of this type are common.

Type 2. Lottery

This is a very easy promotion, where it's enough to fill out a simple form, answer an easy question, or perform some other action requiring minimal effort — and a person becomes a lottery participant.

The goal of a promotion of this type is to increase activity on the page / in the group and draw the attention of "dormant" followers.

The winner in promotions of this type is chosen at random.

If each lottery participant is assigned a number, you can use a random number generator — that way the lottery will be as transparent and trustworthy as possible.

A lottery, if you add a discount to it, can stimulate sales.

And well-crafted lottery terms on a social network can help a business earn more offline.

For example, the CHENSON restaurant made visiting the restaurant at a specific time, on Saturday evening, a condition for participating in the lottery.

And if participants fill out forms, a lottery promotion will also help collect more user data and, going forward, successfully target ads at them.

Type 3. Coupons and discounts

This is one of the most widespread types of promotions on Facebook and Instagram.

Brands can give coupons and discounts for some specific actions: for a review on a third-party platform, for the best epithet directed at the company, or for congratulations on a corporate holiday.

Sometimes coupons and discounts are combined in a single promotion.

Then it looks roughly like this: "Buy a product at a discount now, and get a coupon for your next purchase."

The goal of the promotion, of course, is to stimulate sales.

Type 4. Contests

Organizing a contest is harder than running a lottery, but the result is most often worth the effort spent.

A contest needs a prize, preferably one with sufficient value in the participants' eyes, from your company's product line.

Participation in a contest assumes active actions — for example, in a best-photo contest this photo needs to be taken and posted; in a best-dish contest, you need to cook a dish; and in a best-slogan contest, you need to come up with your own version, which is far from easy.

The downside of this type of promotion is its popularity among "professional" prize hunters, who participate in dozens of contests and, as a rule, create a separate account for this.

This isn't your company's target audience, so you'll have to filter participants.

For example, by including a clause in the promotion rules that accounts containing information about participation in more than 3 contests over the past six months are not eligible for the prize draw.

Contests are good both for warming up an existing audience and for attracting a new one.

After all, almost every contestant develops a group of supporters who, through their active actions, increase the reach of the contest posts.

Type 5. Bonus promotions

Bonuses for certain actions are a good motivating story.

Most often bonuses are the equivalent of an internal currency that can be spent only on your company's products.

Bonuses can accumulate, bonuses can be gifted to a friend (drawing them into the circle of your followers), and bonuses also have a tendency to expire — any kind of deadline motivates active action.

Bonuses perfectly stimulate repeat purchases, and businesses actively take advantage of this.

For example, the company Vinga killed two birds with one stone by offering customers a bonus of 500 UAH toward the purchase of protective gear when buying a hoverboard.

Type 6. An advertising promotion across two social networks

"Cross" promotions aren't encountered too often, and that's a shame.

After all, they can help quickly and noticeably expand the audience, using the capabilities of Facebook and Instagram simultaneously for this.

The mechanics of these promotions assume that to receive a prize — for example, those same discounts, bonuses, or gifts — the promotion participant must show activity on the other social network.

For example, when running a promotion on Facebook, follow the promotion organizer's page on Instagram.

Or, while participating in a promotion on Instagram, make a themed post with the promotion's hashtag on Facebook.

This promotion option suits the most varied business segments.

Type 7. Promotional cross-marketing

The essence of cross-marketing is that two non-competing companies "exchange" their target audiences.

For example, a jewelry brand cooperates with a supermarket, and a bank with a car dealership, because people can buy groceries and "jewelry" at the same time, or take out bank loans to buy a car.

Promotional cross-marketing works the same way.

The tasks this type of promotion solves are expanding the organizer's audience and growing sales for the company providing the prize.

The main thing is that the audiences of the participating companies overlap.

For example, a tombstone-sales business hardly has any reason to partner with a wedding-dress salon.

Example: the outerwear factory "Kalyaev" ran a cross-marketing promotion together with the jewelry brand SUNLIGHT. In this case, no action at all was required from "Kalyaev"'s followers — it was enough to simply use a promo code (and we remember that this is an exclusive for followers). This way, "Kalyaev" increased the loyalty of its audience and warmed up its followers, preparing them for future purchases. With zero investment, which is important! And the SUNLIGHT brand stimulated purchases, because who needs a pendant if there's no chain to wear it on. It's all logical and rational.

How to increase the reach of promotions on Facebook and Instagram

Have you figured out the types and mechanisms?

Now it's the perfect time to talk about the main thing.

About how to attract maximum attention to your promotions on social media.

So that you don't end up painfully regretting time spent in vain!

Today, social networks, following search engines, are becoming smarter.

They try to show users interesting or useful content, betting on meaningful communication.

Based on this, let's reflect on how to increase the reach of promotions on Facebook and Instagram.

Tip 1. Learn more about your audience. On Instagram, statistics are available even for a personal profile — you can see the gender and age of the audience, where the people visiting the page live.

On Facebook this can be seen in the business page's ad account.

In it you can not only track the audience but also create one, precisely targeting your (advertising) posts at those whom it's important to engage.

Besides the capabilities of the social networks themselves, you can also use third-party specialized services that will round out the picture and help you understand who your audience is, how it reacts to various kinds of posts, how ready it is to interact, and at what time it's most active.

The better you know your audience, the higher the probability of thinking up and launching a promotion that will be interesting to it.

And people share interesting content very eagerly — reach grows.

Tip 2. Think through the channels for spreading information about the promotion. These can be not only announcement posts and reminders in your group or community.

Post information with a link to the group on the company website.

Send reminder emails to your follower base.

Teach a chatbot to talk about the promotion during conversations.

Consider paid advertising of the promotion too — if it's aimed at stimulating and increasing sales, that makes sense.

Tip 3. Build up interest. For example, a few days before the promotion starts, run a poll and let followers choose the prize themselves from several options offered.

A sense of involvement is almost a guarantee that people will actively spread information about the promotion, participate in it, and invite other participants.

And that will produce reach growth.

Tip 4. Use the power of video. Video content is gaining popularity — why not use it?

Let a manager or spokesperson from your company talk about the promotion on video.

It's important to do it lively, with spark, and briefly, no longer than 60 seconds.

If that's not possible, simply film a lively 10-15 second promo clip — even that will help increase reach.

Remember that it's important to upload videos directly on the social networks rather than giving links to third-party services. "Native" video is received positively by Facebook and Instagram; links to third-party clips, on the contrary, "cut" reach.

Tip 5. Involve employees in promoting the campaign. Social networks consider posts from family and friends a priority and show them in users' feeds more willingly than posts from business pages/communities/groups. Excellent!

Ask (or motivate) employees to share the company's posts about the promotion, and increase reach this way.

Tip 6. Multiply by two (prizes and audience). Invite promotion participants to tag a friend who, in case of a win, will also receive a prize (the same as the main participant's, or a bit simpler but comparable in value).

The audience of the promotion announcement post will mechanically grow twofold.

Tip 7. Interact! Use interaction with other themed (non-competing) groups, communities, and business pages.

Ask them to repost the promotion in exchange for reposting information important to them in your group.

This isn't difficult, requires no financial expense, and works both to expand reach and to grow your audience overall.

This is interesting. An interesting case about increasing post reach on social media was published by the team at Cerebro Target.

This team took a paradoxical path — it removed 10,000 followers from its community. And that produced a 5x (!) increase in post reach. By getting rid of inactive "ballast" — people who didn't interact with the company's posts at all, bots, blocked users — the page's administration achieved a reach of 123,000 people with a single post. That turned out to be 5 times more than posts gathered on average. An excellent result — this method is at the very least worth thinking about.

Tip 8. Communication after the promotion. The promotion ends, interaction with the audience continues.

Post a photo of the prize being handed over; ask the winner to record a short video or make a text post. This post will surely get shared — that's one.

The part of the audience that missed the promotion, having appreciated the result, will follow the next activities more closely — that's two.

In addition, it makes sense to write thank-you emails for participating; this will reduce the follower churn that happens after a promotion finishes.

Tip 9. Don't work "from a stencil." Social networks are a separate communication channel.

There's no point copying onto this channel promotions that were run, for example, on the website, or in the company's offline store/café/salon.

Plan original promotions so as not to become "stale" to your audience.

A person is hardly going to want to share with friends information about a promotion they're seeing for the tenth time.

Tip 10. Choose the best time to publish the promotion. On social networks you can track the time when the audience is online.

There are two opinions about when it's better to publish posts announcing the start of a promotion: when most of the audience is online, and when most of the audience is offline.

Adherents of the first option say this: we'll choose the time when our audience (and one similar to it by parameters) is online, and show them the post. The reach will be huge.

Adherents of the second option counter: when there are many users online, dozens, if not hundreds, of posts are published every minute.

Your promotion will simply get lost among them — it's tough informational competition. We'll take a different path.

We'll publish the post at night, early in the morning, or on Sunday. Our audience, as soon as they're online, will see it.

And here's what the specialists at Rusability found in 2018 regarding the best time to publish posts, based on analyzing reactions to 295 publications in their own group.

Follower reach turned out to be widest in the second half of the day, from 3 to 6 PM, with a peak between 5 and 6 PM.

Try it, analyze your audience's behavior, and choose the optimal time to launch a promotion.

Recommended reading:

1. Facebook Business: creation and setup
2. 3 methods to make your Facebook advertising effective

Instead of a conclusion

We keep working with social media.

We rely on successful experience.

We add promotions to the promotion strategy.

We grow a loyal audience starting today!

…But the main thing that will make a promotion go viral, increasing reach exponentially, is an original and timely idea.

An example of a very successful non-commercial promotion is the group-promotion (an "anti-gloom flash mob") "Izoizolyatsia" on Facebook.

Created at the end of March 2020, aimed at those bored in quarantine/self-isolation, the group within 2 weeks reached almost 400,000 members.

The posts placed in the group gather an incredible number of reactions.

The owners of the group-promotion need to think about how to monetize the huge audience.

And it's important for businesspeople to take this experience into account when developing ideas for original promotions.

From life experience: to search for ideas, use keyword statistics for your topic, group them creatively, and look for hints.

This method of generating ideas definitely works!

Facebook and Instagram are active social media; by working with them skillfully, you can solve a whole pool of tasks: from drawing attention to a brand to growing sales and business profitability.

Write promotions into your marketing strategy if they aren't there yet.

They will definitely add variety to it, bring liveliness, and help maintain a good level of audience engagement on social media.

Discounts, gifts, contests, cross-marketing can become an excellent source of traffic to the company's pages.

And without traffic, there will simply be no one to sell your product to.