The Love Affair of Social Media Websites and the Daily Deal Industry

As Facebook nears a 1 Billion person userbase, it has become blatantly transparent that social media is here to stay.

Since daily deals began, they have had a unique connection and love affair with social media. Whenever someone gets a great deal on something, we all typically enjoy sharing that fact as if to say, “look at how smart I am because I got this for 90% off!”

User generated recommendations are the most powerful form of advertising for any brand or company and daily deal sites who have a solid presence on the major social media outlets have, and will continue to see, major benefits.

Social media can also be a detriment to your business if someone loses out in the equation and has a bad experience ordering from your daily deal site; they are far more likely to share their bad experience via social media.

Let’s dive right into some tips and recommendations for making the love affair between your daily deal site and social media presence a home run.

1. Pinterest

Pinterest is absolutely blowing up right now. Its traffic ratings are flying off the charts and my prediction is that it is here to stay and will continue growing. Pinterest is young and blossoming before our very eyes. It has a long way to go, and there is still a chance that spammers could turn it in to a Myspace, but for now, the culture is that of sharing information and emphasizing content over popularity of the ‘pinner,’ which gives us a level playing.

Discovering ways to drive traffic using Pinterest isn’t very complicated once you spend any bit of time on the website, but the main goal you should have is to give people a real reason to do more than just browse Pinterest, and instead push them to your deal

The Pinterest Gift section can be great for daily deal website owners to get involved in and drive clicks directly to your offers as most deal sites use images to sell their products anyway. The gifts section puts a little “Gift” banner right on the image making it obvious that a product is for sale.

Use high quality images, be sure to include the % discount directly on the image and feature them on Pinterest as your deals go live. Using #hashtags with your Pinterest images is also a wise move.

Pinterest doesn’t allow animated GIF images so writing in the description of the image to ‘click to see the animated image’ can encourage the Pinterest visitor to actually click through and see what the animated image actually does.

Work on standing out on Pinterest. There is a sea of retailers on there now and so anything that you can do to make your account and boards stand out is the idea. Post up things that bring out the inquisitive side of people. The goal is to make people say, “Oh, I had no idea.” Getting people engaged and re-pinning your items on Pinterest is a win for your branding efforts as well as traffic driving potential.

Because Pinterest is so new, it gives us a unique potential to capitalize and set the stage for your daily deal site early on.

2. Facebook

Facebook’s goal is for businesses and brands to share their stories to connect and engage with people; not for us to use spammy marketing techniques, and the new FB page timeline that was just released is a prime example of this.

If your business is not on Facebook, it’s probably time to bite the bullet and make it happen.

Your Facebook page is a great way to build more brand loyalty, more engagement, and increase the size of your user base. Be sure to post up your new deals and work to do so and craft your posts in a manner that asks for user opinion and feedback. It’s no secret that we all have our opinions and when the correct FB status is posted – it can drive engagement through the roof.

3. YouTube

More and more daily deal sites are starting to see success by using videos to sell their products and service coupons and vouchers. Video makes engaging and connecting with your visitors even easier.

Be sure to have your daily deal site YouTube account created and work to regularly post company updates and videos that will further build out your brand loyalty. Daily Deal sites have struggled to build true brand loyalty because for the most part people are not loyal to daily deal sites, but rather the deals that are offered on those sites.

When posting any YouTube video, be sure to have your raw video file named with your keywords in place and provide a detailed Title. A wise thing you can do is simply use a transcript from your video for your product description and always have a link back to your website in the first line or two (ensuring you use http:// so that the URL is a clickable link). Also, add keywords to your videos that make sense.

A final tip is to paste the actual URL of the YouTube video at the end of your description because many websites automatically pull and syndicate the YouTube videos onto their websites and having the link back directly to the YouTube video will further help you out and get more visitors to your actual video on YT.

4. Twitter

Twitter is a noisy place but be sure to have your daily deal site Twitter username reserved. Many folks recommend 20 or more tweets a day, buts let’s be real about it and only post important things related to your business and industry.

Using #hashtags on Twitter where appropriate can help drive traffic and increase brand awareness.

5. LinkedIn

LinkedIn is another one of the social media players and one that you shouldn’t forget about. LinkedIn is a more professional environment and so using it for strategic relationships and growing your business network is definitely wise.

6. The Others…

I joke with my friends about how many different social media outlets there are. Send me a Facebook message, G-chat me, Skype me, hit me up on LinkedIn, find me on Twitter, send me an email, let’s do a Google hangout, check out my video on YouTube, follow my pictures on Instagram, on Pinterest, etc…

We live in a seriously connected social media world and there are hundreds of different social media outlets that have millions of likeminded individuals on them. These outlets can be a superb place for you to grow your brand, drive traffic, and ultimately get more sales.

Always remember that these websites can be a time drain, and if not carefully monitored you can find yourself getting on Facebook to do a status update for your page only to get sucked in for an hour browsing and clicking around.

There have also been a lot of scenarios where businesses have posted inappropriate things and received a lot of feedback so always be mindful and follow the rules.

Make moves today,
Marc Horne