It’s true that gift cards can boost sales during the holidays and help you generate revenue through the year – but all of your competitors are going to be competing with you to a big slice of the gift card pie this season. Sure, you can place the cards by the registers and put marketing materials in your store – but are you doing anything your competitors aren’t?

Here are four ways you can use social media to sell and promote your gift cards.

1. Ask a question. You can do a hashtag contest on Twitter or a trivia contest on Facebook to help generate conversations. From the participants, choose one at random to receive a free $5 gift card. When this card is redeemed, the winner is very likely going to spend more than the value of the card and will hopefully tell all of his friends about the cool experience he had with your business. Just make sure you follow Facebook’s promotion guidelines.
2. Hold secret giveaways. People love to be part of something exclusive. Encourage your fans and followers to purchase gift cards with a “secret password” giveaway on a consistent day of the week. You could name it Fandom Friday, Secret Saturday or Thank You Thursday, for example. On that day each week, you release a password and you give away a $5 gift card with any gift card purchase when a fan or follower says the password. Here is an example:

“Hey, Fans! It’s Thank You Thursday! Just for being our Facebook fan, you’ll get a FREE $5 gift card with any gift card purchase when you show up and say ‘sneakers’ to our cashiers! See you soon!”

3. Make them find it. Hide a loaded gift card somewhere around town. Once it’s been carefully secured, begin giving hints about its whereabouts on your social media pages. As you continue to release clues, you’re reminding your fans that you have gift cards and you’re also increasing interest in your audience. The only catch? The winner must post or tweet a photo of the location once it’s found so that the rest of the fans aren’t left in that awful state of unsatisfied curiosity until the next contest.
4. Sign them up. Create an email marketing sign-up form on your Facebook page. If you’re not sure how to do that, you can utilize a third-party application like Wildfire, Pagemodo or many others. Promise to give a $50 gift card to one lucky winner who signs up for your email campaign during a certain time frame. You can then take those email addresses and add them to your database. The first email campaign you should send? That’s right, gift cards! This is another one where you want to make sure you adhere to Facebook’s guidelines. You can also use Twitter to spread the word and bring some of your Twitter followers over to your Facebook page.

Do you have suggestions for a social media gift card campaign? Leave your success story in the comments.

Tags: facebook, gift card contests, gift card sales, gift cards, social media, twitter

This entry was posted by Leigh Pinkston, Social Media Manager on Monday, November 14th, 2011 at 3:29 pm and is filed under Hospitality, Retail, Sports and Entertainment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.