3 Easy Ways to Grow Earned Media

Of the three media types you’ll find in social marketing — paid, earned and owned — earned media is the holy grail because it fulfills the unique promise of creating authentic social proof for your brand. Facebook users want to do, see, and buy what they see other users doing, seeing, and buying. In fact, 68% of Facebook users are more likely to buy based on an earned media recommendation from a Facebook friend.
There’s a catch though: You can’t buy or create earned media directly. Your brand’s Facebook page will have to organically develop earned media — likes, shares and comments — which means you must run marketing campaigns that are optimized for engagement and sharing activity.
Here are three simple ways you can design social media campaigns that influence users to create earned media.

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1. Play Up the Personality

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Users who interact with branded applications (apps) are more likely to elect to share their interactions via their news feeds if the apps reflect their style, aptitude, or personality. Recent data shows that the top apps users are likely to broadcast results for pick-your-favorites, quizzes and trivia. In fact, when interacting with a branded quiz app, participants are three times more likely to share the results to their news feeds versus when they participate in a video contest or enter a sweepstakes.
So when putting together a plan for your next social marketing campaign, consider how you can plan the content or application to allow users to express themselves. If you’re putting together a voting app, for instance, think through how you can set it up so that users are voting on something that expresses an opinion they’d feel proud to share, and make sure the app includes a mechanism for sharing their voting outcome via a news feed message.

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2. Make Sharing Worth Their While

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Users on Facebook are very conscious of clutter in their feeds. They don’t want to be a source of spam to their friends. Keep this in mind as you screen potential interactions that a user could have with your Facebook applications and content, and you will have a good idea of what’s inherently shareable and what isn’t. The main question to ask yourself when crafting content is, “if I posted about my interaction with this content, what would be in it for me? What would be in it for my friends?” In the example below, a user might share the results of a quiz she took because: She gets to display results to her friends that prove she is trustworthy and practical, which is consistent with her own self-image; She thinks her friends might also find the quiz entertaining; Or she wants to publicly align herself with a cause that users can rally around, like tree planting in Haiti.

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3. Mix It Up

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Certain marketing campaigns naturally inspire users to broadcast their interactions with a brand. But often, the types of marketing campaigns that are most entered by users are not the same as the campaigns that are most heavily shared by users. Popular campaigns like sweepstakes, giveaways, and coupons are proven to get users to enter, but entrants are less likely, for example, to voluntarily share the fact that they just entered a sweepstakes. That means these campaigns types typically generate less earned media from each entrant.
A few reasons for this may include that there is often an inherent disadvantage to sharing when your odds of winning a sweepstakes are in direct proportion to the number of entrants. Also, there is often no incentive to share, meaning no perceived advantage or value-added from the user’s perspective. And sometimes, users just don’t want to clutter their friends’ news feeds.
This is no reason, however, to shut off the tap on sweepstakes and contests. Different marketing goals are achieved by different means, including your social media campaigns. While your goal with one campaign might be engagement, another might be sharing and earned media. And just as paid media campaigns should be adapted to drive different types of user activity, so should custom content initiatives. A well-rounded social media marketing program includes a steady drip of varied applications and content designed to influence a range of user interactions. Don’t rely on just one or two campaign types.
In the example below, Delta has more than six custom content applications available for users to interact with. Each tab does something different, and while the activity offered on one tab will perform better at enticing user signups, another tab will be best for inspiring user-generated content submissions and sharing.


What campaign initiatives that you’ve run for your brand(s) in the past have been the most successful at generating earned media from users? Tell us in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, sodafish

Victoria Ransom is founder and CEO of Wildfire, a global leader in social media marketing software. She is also a sought-after expert on social marketing trends and was recently named a 2012 TechFellow by the Founders Fund, NEA, and TechCrunch. For more on social advertising, register here for Wildfire’s free on-demand webinar.

3 Easy Ways to Grow Earned Media