Search Marketing Sage

We kicked off the first SMX Social with a great panel of Arnie Kuenn, President of Vertical Measures, Drew Conrad, Social Media Marketing Specialist at Zagg, and Kevin Scholl, the Social Media Manager at Red Roof Inn, discussing “Free Facebook Tactics to Drive Traffic & Conversions”.

Kevin Scholl

Kevin kicked things off with sharing tactics that Red Roof Inn uses. Since it was founded in 1973, much has changed for Red Roof Inn, including how they communicate and how they engage with guests. They’re focusing much of their time on Facebook right now.

Early on, they saw that there was a lot of content around people travelling with their pets, using photos and other media. To segment this better and to ensure that this user content didn’t block other important content from the Red Roof FB page, they created another page for the pet lovers called “Red Roof Loves Pets”.

Kevin’s first tactic: Talk is cheap. Most of their energy is spent coming up with content and monitoring, not investing in tools or technology. They are monitoring Facebook 24/7 and try to get to comments within an hour. They pay attention to what people are talking about, their feedback and more to have a meaningful conversation.

Tactic 2: Customer Created Content. Brand advocates can be the best member of your social team — they work for FREE! They leave their page open to allow others to post to it. He showed examples of other brands, including Dunkin Donuts and Skittles, that use customer content on their Facebook pages. A quick look at Red Roof’s FB page shows that they are currently running a 12 days of Christmas photo submission effort.

Tactic 3: Content is King. Once you set up a Facebook page, you have to create content to engage with visitors. Kevin emphasized that he’d rather have 10,000 engaged members than 100,000 disinterested members. One thing that Red Roof does is to use content that shows you care. He shared an example from Veteran’s Day and how they partnered with the Disabled American Veterans and made a donation and each promoted the partnership. It garnished about 2,000 new likes for Red Roof.

Tactic 4:  What do you think? Red Roof uses Facebook as a springboard for customer feedback.

Tactic 5: Be different. You don’t have just show content that is relevant to your brand or products.

Tactic 6:  Be sure to respond!

Tactic 7: Partner. Partnering shows your community that you care and it expands your audience.

Tactic 8: Like Red Roof Inn on Facebook.

Drew Conrad

Drew Conrad from Zagg spoke next and started by talking about their blog. Of the bulk of content the blog creates, they’ll take several per week and post them to the Facebook page. If they see something is doing well on Twitter (using it as a barometer), they will share that blog post on Facebook as well.

ZAGG has three main social media goals:

1. Get the user from Facebook to ZAGG.com. (they have to be very ROI focused)
2. Convert the potential customer.
3. Collect an email address.

Arnie first emphasized developing your Facebook strategy. Why are you creating the content you’re creating? Who is your audience? Who are you? What will you measure? What is different a year from now?