SOW 148: John Wallin – Contests, Reviews, & Social Media

Johan Wallin has a background in property management and started implementing the Internet at an early stage in this field. In 2008 he started his own business and was looking to do some marketing for that business. Social Media was just breaking out at this time and he took a social media class to learn more about using social media to market a business and fell in love with how social media can be used to help businesses. In late 2009 he completely shifted gears, launched his consulting business “My Social Partner” and set out to help as many businesses as possible with how to use social media in their marketing.

In 2012 Johan started working with “Smash It Social” and utilizing their app “Real Fan Reviews” and was promoted to CEO of the company in august 2013. Over the years Johan has personally coached hundreds of businesses on social media and shown them how to use a contest/sweepstakes strategy to really supercharge results in Social Media.

For more information visit:
http://johanwallin.me
http://smashitsocial.com
http://GetFanReviewsNow.com

Narrator: Speakers, publishers, consultants, coaches, and info marketers unite. The speaking of wealth show is your road map to success and significance. Learn the latest tools, technologies and tactics to get more bookings, sell more products and attract more clients. If you’re looking to increase your direct response sales, create a big time personal brand, and become the go to guru, the speaking of wealth show is for you. Here is your host, Jason Hartman.

Jason Hartman: Welcome to the speaking of wealth show. This is your host Jason Hartman, where we discuss profit strategies for speakers, publishers, authors, consultants, coaches, info marketers, and just go over a whole bunch of exciting things that you can use to increase your business, to make your business more successful and more and more passive and more and more automated and more and more scalable. So we will be back with a great interview. Be sure to visit us at SpeakingofWealth.com. You can take advantage of our blog, subscribe to the RSS feed, and many other resources for free and SpeakingofWealth.com and we will be back with a great interview for you in less than 60 seconds.

Start of Interview Johan Wallin

Jason Hartman: It’s my pleasure to welcome Johan Wallin to the show. He is the CEO of Smash It Social. And you’re all probably using Facebook for your marketing and you know how important that is. It’s such a great platform – probably a billion plus people there right now. Facebook is a phenomenal place to be, and there are some real techniques. There are techniques for using contests on Facebook, and we have not done a show on this yet. So I’m very excited to hear more from Johan, and we want to talk also about the importance of reviews and testimonials. So Johan, welcome. How are you?

Johan Wallin: Thank you so much, Jason. I am doing great. Thank you for having me on the show. I really appreciate it.

Jason Hartman: Well it’s my pleasure and it’s good to have you. Now, I met you at a Master Mind retreat and when we first met I said gosh, I really want to start doing contests. I’m so bad at this. In my different companies that I have, we’ve done a few contests. We’ve kind of toyed with the idea, but I think contests are big. I think there’s a big opportunity here. So first of all maybe, tell us how you got started in this if you would and why it’s important. Then I know we’re going to go through seven sort of guidelines, if you will, for holding a successful contest.

Johan Wallin: Absolutely. So basically Facebook has become part of everybody’s everyday life. What Facebook has really become is the new word of mouth marketing for businesses. And we ended up taking this and creating a tool that would utilize the viral features of Facebook. And we actually, I want to talk about some of the things that a lot of businesses today are really losing out on, and that is gathering testimonials and reviews and so forth. So what we did was we created a Facebook application, now it’s evolved into a full blown software, but it still lives on Facebook mainly. What it does is that it gathers reviews, and if it’s a positive review it shares it out on Facebook to both the page for the business, so that the fans of the business see those great reviews, so you stay top of the mind, oh wow they got another great review, and you build that trust even further.

But the coolest part of the software is that what also happens when you get a 4 or 5 star review is that it creates a post on the reviewer’s timeline, on Facebook so that the friends of the reviewers can see that they wrote a review about this business. Because really what is so important is that the people that you have the most influence over sees your reviews. So if you have somebody that writes a review on Yelp, and Yelp reviews are great – Google reviews are great…

Jason Hartman: I just want to mention something about that by the way. There was some news just the other day. Apparently Yelp has received a lot of complaints at the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC, and there’s over two thousand complaints from business owners claiming that they are being extorted by Yelp because people, and this is alleged of course, I don’t know if this is actually true but two thousand people, that’s a lot of complainers. And they’re saying that sales reps with Yelp call them and say if you advertise with us, we’ll get rid of these negative reviews. So I don’t know, that’s kind of interesting. I just wanted to point that out, because I literally just saw that story in the news media about two days ago.

Johan Wallin: And there’s been other news as well about them regarding how authentic their reviews are, and those kind of things. Where on Facebook, the reviews there, you can actually click on the profile and you can see that it’s a real human being that wrote the review.

Jason Hartman: Well, not always. Facebook has fake profiles of course. But yeah, this is part of the problem. And this is kind of on a tangent here, but this is part of the problem with the internet. On one hand, especially for political purposes and the first amendment, people should be allowed to speak anonymously, but the other side of that double edge sword is that people do things anonymously that they would never do if it wasn’t anonymous. So you get these, and listeners probably know this term, what’s known as internet trolls. And these are people who literally, their stock and trade is libel and slander, and they go around slandering people, they make nasty comments, they just do really mean, bad things. And because of the anonymity issue, they can get away with it whereas they couldn’t do that in real life. If they came up to you on the street and did that, they’d probably get punched.

Johan Wallin: Exactly. And when it comes to reviews and testimonials, it’s important that there’s some level of trust there. And with having the Facebook profile, most of them, even if there’s a fake one you can probably figure out which ones are real and which ones are fake, but it’s so neat to have that authentication built in. And what’s really neat about this application as well is that if I go and I read a review on Yelp or Google local or whatever it may be, I have no personal connection to the person who wrote that review. Can I trust it, can I not?

Jason Hartman: On Facebook you do.

Johan Wallin: Exactly. So if you see a review that my really good buddy wrote, I’m going to trust that a lot more than I’m going to trust what someone that I don’t know wrote. So it’s a really neat feature that it shares out virally on Facebook to the reviewers timeline, which is then seen in the newsfeed of their friends. So it’s a really neat feature. Another thing that a lot of, even if you have an application like this or you’ve set up your Yelp account for your business or your Google local, what a lot of businesses are missing is really systemizing the gathering of reviews. So it’s really, really important that you have an easy method for people to go and leave reviews.

So you need to have a strategy. As soon as you’ve added value or somebody has consumed a product, whatever it is that the business is selling, or they’ve gone through the experience, whatever it may be. There should be a system in place where you ask for the review at the right time. And then that there’s also an easy way for them to leave the review. So there needs to be a short link that takes them to the place where they write the review. So you send out an email with this link, click on this link, it takes them to the review page, they write the review and they’re done. So it’s easy for the reviewer to actually find it. So if they have to find the Facebook page or Google local page or whatever it may be, you’re going to lose so many of them because they’re going to get busy with something else and not because they don’t want to but because everybody’s life is busy and you’re going to lose a vast majority if you don’t have a good system of receiving reviews.

Jason Hartman: Sure. Okay, so there’s an ethical line here that everybody needs to be careful of in their business. Of course, it would not be ethical to pay people or reward them directly for giving you a positive review, right? However, you can make it easy, you can ask for reviews and you can actually hold contests to get reviews. Now, they could say something negative if they want to. But tell us about that and make sure you cover kind of the ethical angle on it too, if you would.

Johan Wallin: Yeah, absolutely. And running a contest of a sweepstakes or a promotion… those are all words that are intertwined and used, but for the sake of the conversation let’s just say contests. Because the differentiators, really a contest is defined actually where there’s some skill involved. So if it’s a drawing contest, then there’s some skill involved and it’s considered a contest. Then, if it’s a sweepstakes then it’s a random drawing, so it’s purely based on luck. So let’s just for the sake of the argument call them contests or promotions. And running a contest is, in my experience, by far the best way on Facebook to get people to take action. And I’ll kind of go through here in a second, how you can set up a successful contest or a promotion on Facebook. Because there are several steps that you need to think about before you launch your contest.

But all you need to do is basically have an incentive for people to take action. And one of those actions it’s recommended to have a review. Because it should be such an essential part of a business, is to receive testimonials and to receive reviews. And it’s not that you’re giving them something to write a review, or hey, write this and I’ll give you a $5 gift card… it’s not that. But you’re giving them an incentive to take action, and one of those actions is to write a review, maybe like your page, it can be all kinds of different steps that they can take to enter into your contest or promotion.

And it’s incredible to see the difference when you have some kind of incentive, the amount of actions that people are able to take when you have an incentive. It becomes a game, it becomes fun for people to do it. And I’ve seen some phenomenal results with running contests on Facebook, where it actually affects the bottom line.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so give us an example. Talk about maybe a case study with one of your clients. First of all, what is the contest? What do they say? What’s the message that says here’s the contest, what are the prizes, what’s the call to action, what do people need to do to enter?

Johan Wallin: Yeah, so let me kind of take you through the seven steps because there’s so many different contests you can do. A while ago, Facebook actually changed their rules. So before you could never do a contest on your timeline. You couldn’t say comment on this post, or like this post, like our page. You couldn’t include any of those native Facebook functions in a promotion. A lot of people did anyways, but it was not allowed. But they actually changed those rules now. So you can run small little promotions or contests on your Facebook page, directly on your Facebook page. You can publish a post on your Facebook page and you can say we’re going to randomly pick one of you guys. Comment on this post and we’re going to randomly pick one of you to give you a ten dollar gift card to the coffee shop.

Jason Hartman: Okay, so you can do that, and it’s great because what you can do with a contest is you can… and we’re not talking about reviews here at all, we’re just talking about engagement. You can get people in the habit of engaging with your page. And when they engage, of course that’s viral because it shows up in someone else’s feed and then someone else may like the page who didn’t even know about the page before just because your friend engaged with it. Okay, so that’s fantastic.

Johan Wallin: And, another point to that too, the more you get people to engage with your page, the more they’re going to see your other posts naturally in their news feed. So Facebook has an algorithm where one of the factors that they factor in is how well connected to your page any one of the people that have liked your page is, right? So the more they interact with your page, the more of your posts they’re going to see in their new feed on an ongoing basis. Does that make sense? So any post on your Facebook page is generally only seen by 5 to 20% of your audience, of the people who have already liked your Facebook page based on time, how well connected they are to your page and so on. So getting that engagement is fantastic.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. No question about it, engagement. So it’s obviously worth more if someone comments on a post, and we’re talking about your fan page, right? You can’t do this with your personal pages can you?

Johan Wallin: Correct. They actually launched for some profiles where you can actually boost a post on your personal profile.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, I know. I see those messages come through and Facebook suggests that I boost a post, but I don’t want to do that, because I think my friends would feel that I’m awfully needy if I actually paid to boost my post with a picture of my dog, who’s the cutest dog in the world and shouldn’t need any boosting.

Johan Wallin: Yeah, exactly, but they’re trying to find new ways to make money.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, that one’s a little weird on the personal side.

Johan Wallin: So basically when I set up a contest I go through 7 basic steps. So if I’m doing this for another business, then obviously understanding the business and knowing who their target audience is obviously a precursor to all of these steps. Because that’s really number one. You have to know your audience, who they are… what’s your main target audience? So that’s an important factor to think about first. But really step one in creating a successful contest is setting your objective. So is it I want more page likes? I want to get reviews or testimonials, I want new leads, I want to grow my email list, I want people to sign up for a free trial, I want to give away a free estimate or a quote, or it could be a combination of these things. But that is step number one. You have to figure out, what do I want out of the contest first before you can look at anything else.

After that, step two is the targeting and finding your audience. So after you know what you want your outcome to be, you can figure out who your target audience is for the contest or promotion. Is it your current customers? So for instance, if getting reviews and testimonials is one of the objectives, then obviously one of your target audience is going to be your current customers because they’re the ones that are going to be able to write those raving reviews, right? Is it past customers? Is that your audience, that you’re trying to get them back, get them to repurchase or something like that…

 

Jason Hartman: Or is it new prospects?

Johan Wallin: Right. Is it friends of customers, new prospects, or general public. Or again, a combination of any of these audiences based on what the outcome is going to be. Step three, now that you know who your audience is you need to figure out what their trigger is. And this has to do with picking your prizes. So when you’re doing a promotion, you’re going to give away something for free. Now if it’s current customers, maybe you have a high end info product that costs thousands of dollars, maybe a lot of your customers have come in and they’re at a lower entry point, and that’s a big trigger for them to win this high end product of yours. That’s an option. Other ones that always work well are the techy items like an iPad, a Kindle, an Apple TV, something like that.
Other options are… gift cards work well. We’ve done those in the past as well. If you’re a local business it could be dinner and a show. You win a dinner and a show on the town, a resort stay, something like that.

Jason Hartman: Yeah, and the great thing for a lot of our audience, is they’re infopreneurs, so they can give away digital versions of their products which virtually is no cost.

Johan Wallin: Absolutely.

Jason Hartman: What were you going to say about the resort though?

Johan Wallin: It’s just another prize that you can give away. If your target audience is… you’re an insurance agent, and your target audience is high end home owners that have houses that are worth half a million or more, maybe a net worth of two million, whatever it may be. They can buy as many iPads as they want. That’s not going to get them to take action. However, maybe a weekend stay at a resort might. That’s always something that might trigger them more than a little techy item. So you have to figure out what your target audience is and what’s going to trigger them to take action.

So that’s step three, picking the prices. Step four is what do you want your action steps to be in the promotion itself? So here’s where you look back at step number one, set your objectives. What did you want the outcome to be? Now you need to figure out what steps do you want people to take? So in most cases when we set up a promotion for either ourselves or a private client is one, leave a review. Two could be refer a friend or sign up on our email list. Step three, sign up for a free trial. So you have them, and you can also have comment on this post or something similar to that, depending on what you wanted the outcome to be.

But you need to figure out, look at your outcome, figure out what steps do you want people to take. And again, here’s another important thing to think about… so if you had a combination of things in your outcomes, maybe you had reviews for your current customers, that’s one thing. If you also wanted to include the general public, you can have comment on a post, or sign up for my email list. Now you’re including others than just your current customers, so you have a way of getting them in your funnel and being able to sell to them eventually. Or if you’re targeting prospects you can do the free trials, free estimates, those kind of things. So that is step four.

Step five, set your timeframe for your contest. So figure out depending on how big of a promotion it is, if you’re giving away thousands of dollars’ worth of stuff you might want to stretch it out a little bit, but a sweet spot that we have found is usually 3-4 weeks to run a promotion. And it also depends on the kind of profession you’re in. If you’re a real estate agent obviously those sales cycles are fairly long, so you might want to extend your promotion time frame a little bit. If it’s something that you can get people to take action really quick and you’re selling items that are a lower price point and you can move fast, then a shorter promotional time frame…

Jason Hartman: So give us an example of those timeframes. Like from where to where?

Johan Wallin: I would say…

Jason Hartman: A contest can’t be too long or people would just lose interest.

Johan Wallin: Right, exactly. And that’s the thing. It needs to be somewhat short. So I would say it could be anywhere from two weeks, or even one week if it’s just a small contest. But I would say the sweet spot is anywhere from 2-5 weeks. Any longer than that, people are going to be procrastinators because we all are naturally by just being humans. And they’re going to push it off, push it off, push it off no matter how long or short your contest is. So sweet spot is really 3-4 weeks if you’re running a promotion. Because you want people to have that sense of urgency that I have to act now, or I’m going to miss out.

So the other thing that you need to consider is if you’re running a business that has certain cycles. So if you’ve got new classes starting, let’s say you’re a gym and you’ve got 10-week programs, you want to run promotions so they’re in line with your new classes starting. So you kind of drum up this buzz and excitement about this promotion, and oh here we go. We’ve got some new classes starting here in two weeks. Holiday sales or just boosting sales during low months, those are things you can consider while setting the timeframe for your contest.

Jason Hartman: Makes sense. Okay, what’s the next one?

Johan Wallin: The next one is step six, and this is really the most important one and that’s marketing. This is really where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. And it’s an extremely important piece in running a promotion because you can have the greatest promotion but if nobody knows about it, you’re not going to get people to take action. So you need to look back to step two where we identified the target audience. And figure out how do I reach those people? If it’s current customers, you need to send out several emails during the promotion reminding them. Because a lot of people are going to be like, oh cool after I get done with this I’m going to enter my review, and then they get busy and they forget. And then a couple of days later you send them a reminder, and you maybe show a great review you just got… you have to constantly remind them about it.

If it’s the general public, being active on social media, running some Facebook ads is phenomenal if you are also in your contest reaching out to the general public or prospects. So that is a very important step. And then step number seven, which is a step that most people actually skip out on and forget, and that’s follow up. So once people are in your promotional funnel, follow up on them. So if they left a review, thank them for their review and remind them that they also have other ways that they can increase their chances of winning, by completing several other steps.

Ask for a referral, ask people to invite people into the contest, and take that opportunity to actually start a conversation with new prospects. And then have next steps ready for people to take. Is it a free consultation? Some bonus material you can send to them once you’ve made a connection? Is it your email, so if one of the steps is enter into our email list, if you don’t have a follow up sequence in that email list once they’ve signed up, it’s kind of a lost cause. That lead is going to turn cold and you’re not going to convert that into a sale. So making sure that you have the follow up is the last and final step on the seven step process on how to create a successful Facebook contest.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. And Johan, let’s just quickly touch on your solution to this. You have a system that automates some of this in terms of the review process. Just take a minute and talk about that, if you would.

Johan Wallin: Yeah, absolutely. I appreciate that. So the application that we have for this that kind of generates this viral buzz is called Real Fan Reviews. And it’s like you mentioned, it’s owned by Smash It Social, which I run. And you can actually find out more about this by going to SmashItSocial.com or if you want to read about the product itself you can go to GetFanReviewsNow.com and that’s going to show you the product and everything. If there is anybody on here that wants to pull the trigger, I have a coupon code for you guys: firstmonthfree, which is one word with all lower case letters. And that’s going to give you a free month just to try it out, and see how much you love it. The customers that we have, they are our raving fans.

So you take this platform and you couple it with this whole contest strategy and it’s amazing the results you can get. So it’s super, super cool and I really want to encourage you guys, whether you use our platform or any other tool out there, definitely implement a system for getting reviews for your business on an ongoing basis.

Jason Hartman: That’s fantastic. This is a great idea, and if people listening, like myself included, are not really taking advantage of the power of contests, they’re missing out. And I know that I’ve just been leaving money on the table in all of my businesses by not doing this. I remember a few years back we held a little contest, we said make a YouTube video and get a free ticket to our Meet The Masters of Income Property Event. And I couldn’t believe it, it was awesome. Why didn’t we repeat this? People made these fantastic videos, stuck them on YouTube, people watched them, they were telling us how much they loved our services, and how real estate investing has transformed their lives.

One guy, get this Johan, he even wrote a song, like a custom song and played it on his guitar and put it on YouTube. And it was a great song really. And we actually had him sing his song and play the guitar and everything at our live event where we had about a hundred people. So I think this is just a no brainer. You’ve got to do it. take advantage of contests, increase your reviews, and it’s just a great thing. So thank you so much for sharing this today. Again, what is the website?

Johan Wallin: It’s GetFanReviewsNow.com, and the coupon code to get a free month is firstmonthfree, all one word in lowercase letters.

Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Okay, and then mention the other one for contests.

Johan Wallin: So it’s right now, we’re developing a program for teaching people how to run contests appropriately, more like a done for you program. We don’t have it out yet. If you want to schedule a consultation, you can always contact us at support@smashitsocial.com and we’ll set something up where we can discuss any future plans or if you have any questions on running contests. We’re here to help you guys out.

Jason Hartman: Great, good stuff. Johan Wallin, thank you for joining us.

Johan Wallin: Thank you Jason.

Announcer: What’s great about the shows you’ll find on JasonHartman.com is that if you want to learn how to finance your next big real estate deal, there’s a show for that. If you want to learn more about food storage and the best way to keep those onions from smelling up everything else, there’s a show for that. If you honestly want to know more about business ethics, there’s a show for that. And if you just want to get away from it all and need to know something about world travel, there’s even a show for that. Yep, there’s a show for just about anything, only from JasonHartman.com or type in “Jason Hartman” in the iTunes store. (Image: Flickr | ChrisL_AK)

Transcribed by Ralph

The Speaking of Wealth Team

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