Ballin’ during the off-season
While at Influenster, I led editorial content and social media strategy. This often involved working directly with the UX team to create timely, ad-hoc contests to combat user engagement or acquisition challenges the company was seeing seasonally.
My responsibilities included:
+ Helping ideate on timely, relevant contests to engage users
+ Coordinating with UX team for straightforward, easy-to-execute contests
+ Creating sponsored editorial and social media content for brand partners
+ Developing strategies for contest promotion including email, social media, website placements, and editorial content
Let the games begin
creating a snowball effect during the holidays
Naturally, during the end of year, the user engagement and acquisition numbers tend to decline from the extensive holiday season. Additionally, the cost-per-click skyrockets during the last quarter so it was proving difficult to efficiently maintain growth.
In order to bring members back to the site and encourage low cost acquisitions, we created a simplified referral contest where current members would gain a raffle entry for each new referral to the site. In order to combat entrants creating fake accounts or acquiring low quality accounts we decided to add in a clause to require a social media verification step to the invitees' sign ups.
This contest was promoted via email, social media, sponsored editorial content, site pop ups and banners, and push notifications.
The Result
The first ever Friend Flurry in 2014 yielded a 724% boost in sign ups for its duration.
Due to its success, Friend Flurry became an annual tradition that runs each December.
making connections during march madness
For this particular company, it is critical that members connect their social media accounts to their profile so they can tell how influential they are on social.
During the spring the company was concerned about users only connecting one of their accounts, or connecting fake accounts that weren't valuable to them. To boost our over-all connections, we decided to capitalize on the spirit of March Madness and competition. Users could gain entries towards prizes, through their social connects. Each connection counted towards a user's overall Impact score, a branded term that translated to that user's sum of friends and followers.
To persuade members to connect their actual, personal accounts, we granted bonus entries based on how many followers they had across all of their connections. This effectively dissuaded connecting fake accounts with little to no followers. To ensure we were properly acknowledging existing member connections, we made sure any prior connections were automatically converted to entries.
Similar to the holiday referral program, this contest was promoted via email, social media, sponsored editorial content, prominent site placement, and push notifications.
The Result
Although the contest ran only a short three weeks, we boosted the average daily social connects by 566% and collectively grew our overall social connect count from the previous three years by 12.5%.