Let Others Promote You Through Social Media By Giving Something Away

Many businesses will often have information, research data, web tools, discount codes, or PDF documents & e-books to give away. We have previously offered free how to write web content guide and a free link building guide to those that sign up for our newsletters. A link is often provided on the website and they aren’t often promoted externally much so what solutions have people found to make this easier?

Technology and the Social Web

As the number of people using the web grows then so do the advances in technology allowing for faster fibre broadband internet access. Couple this with the different devices used, which from our 10 largest clients we found that mobile web browsing increased by 243% over November 2009 to August 2010. But besides web browsing, I bet people spend most of their time on social media sites and networking with others.

Social Sharing Based Competitions

One trick being utilised by professionals is to provide a piece of content or give away a prize on Twitter. The catch is, you need to tweet the original tweet to all of your followers. This allows you to enter the competition or gain access to the freebie but as a result you are also promoting the original tweet to all of your followers. If this catches on it can spread and provide lots of good social signals, better online brand building, and an increase in visitors from social media sites.

There are a number of tools that help you do this but I came across one today called Cloud Flood which is free of charge and displays the 3 simple steps needed; create your content, create a “tweet it” button, and reap the benefits.

Basically, if you have something on your website to give away, you can make people share it socially with their followers and promote it for you before letting them have it for free.

UPDATE: We came across a good example of this at Unbounce for its Noob Guide to Online Marketing where the free PDF eBook can be downloaded after you pay with a tweet.

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