Your snomowbile club may be the biggest event holder in your state. Your club is sponsoring racing, drags, or even a massive ice fishing contest, you could be generating thousands of “touches” in your surrounding area.
But what are you doing with those people?
I have been playing with the Facebook Developer console, and came across some extremely easy ways for people to add what the marketing world is calling a “FanGate” to their pages.
A Facebook Fangate sounds strange, but picture it simply as a Gate to some amazing trails, and you are the landowner. You make a person jump through an easy hoop (clicking the “Like” button), and then reward them.
The best thing is, because so many mom and pop shops are benefiting hugely from this (think Coupons, etc); there have been a huge amount of easy to use solutions pop up that will automatically create the script for you, and point to the correct images. Most people simply make a fan gate a means of a reward, whether it’s a discount code, a funny video, or some top secret message your need a little orphan annie decoder ring to read.
I say consider taking this a step further. Use this to deliver GPS Snowmobile Maps. Publish your groomer schedules, save them as a picture, and use the fangate to force people to like your club to see the schedule. My favorite use of this is a very complex process, that would be a little difficult to setup without knowing some code, but you could force people to like you to register for a large event (maybe offer $1 off, better parking spots, seating, whatever). Then once liked, you have them register. Once they register for your event (even paying, if you have the right setup), you can have the submission/registry push an App request to publish to wall, or simply push out the popup that requests they publish the story to their wall themselves.
Why force people to like your snowmobile club?
If you made it that far, you may be thinking these are some fairly aggressive tactics. From a professional marketing and ad agency background, they WERE. We used to do this via email, people resisted. Facebook, for whatever reason, comes with a level of expectation to be contacted for marketing purposes. So not one person will resist liking you, and most will gladly publish their stories bragging about registration, downloading GPS maps, whatever they did. To make them willing and accepting though, you have to offer something small in return. Even if the parking isn’t “special” buy some twine, stakes, and pretend it is.
Is this for everyone? No. Unless you’re forcing everyone through a facebook FanGate to download trail maps, or see trail conditions (which I don’t advise), the hassel of a fan gate setup isn’t really worth it. You need 100+ people not already in your club coming to you for something to pull value out of it.
Cost, vs Value?
So you may wonder, what does a Fan Gate cost? Assuming you can make the PDF’s or Images, and use one of the solid free solutions out there. It will just cost your time. Maybe an hours worth as you are new to it (once youre a pro, a simple fan gate takes about 5 minutes to setup though).
But the Value? Well, as long as you don’t overpost stories, and inane information to the facebook wall, you will be able to reach out and touch those users repeatedly. If your event draws hundreds, that is 100 possible donators added to your mailing list. You will probably even pickup 10-20 club members, easily, out of a pool that size.
I would love to show you a site of ours that utilizes this, but the clubs I help manage (my clubs that is), do not draw any big crowds. So we haven’t had much opportunity to create something for this. If you are a large snowmobile club though and are debating giving this a shot, we will give you a hand as long as you don’t mind sharing your success with us, and the rest of the ClubHosting.org audience.
For a general idea of some uses of a Fangate, check out the ClubHosting.org facebook page:
https://facebook.com/clubhosting/
(keep in mind, our Get a Site app was made just today, and needs to have the pages updated)
To find some easy to use tools, search for FanGate tools, or similar. Or check these out below.
I do not like linking to outside companies in this blog, Wildfire does supposedly have a decent app. Hosted Iframe looks simple. Involver has places to paste your own HTML, which is better for a more serious developer. Tab Press by HyperArts is probably another great solution. I like the people @ HA, and must admit, have been helped by them multiple times when we get stumped over all the little things that make up the web.