As a professional social media speaker, I’ve spoken at over 300 events to 10,000s of people who want to learn, and grow their business by using the right tools. What makes my job as an educator even more special, is when I get feedback from an audience member on how they have achieved success through attending and actioning tools from my seminar.

Stephanie, Founder of Elephant in my Handbag which sells fabric, ribbon and scrummy whatnots, attended my seminar at the Craft Hobby + Stitch show in February where I talked about how to do social media in 30 minutes a day. Stephanie hadn’t seen me speak before but found the subject matter of social media appropriate for her business, and especially running competitions on Facebook.

It is always nerve wracking for a small business to use Facebook as an outlet to achieve more sales. With Facebook’s new algorithm and their terms and conditions, it can be hard to target ALL of your followers with just one post.

Elephant in my Handbag has been up and running for three years, from selling ribbon on eBay to now selling through various channels, boasting 13,000 followers on Facebook alone.

Stephanie had been recommended other third party competition tools but found that they were difficult to use. During my seminar, I spoke about Gleam and how this tool can be used to run competitions inside of Facebook. After my seminar, Stephanie took this on board and chose Gleam to run her first official Facebook Giveaway.

Her main goal was to capture email addresses for her email marketing list, while offering one lucky winner three big bundles of Fabric, worth around £35. The cost of running the competition on Facebook was £25 and promoting the post over a 7 day period cost £40. Stephanie spent no longer than two hours building her competition, which include enticing text and nicely photographed images, launching the competition over a 10 day period.

She marketed the competition through Facebook, with an added push through post promotion as well as through her regular mailout. The outcome was amazing.

Stephanie increased her Facebook following by 1,700 and increased her email marketing list by 2,700. This means it cost Stephanie 2.4p per lead. Once the competition was over, Stephanie announced the winner via her blog on her website, which drove even more traffic to her business and offered all the entrants 10% off on their next order which was used on numerous occasions following the end of the competition.

The reason I wanted to share this story with you, is to show you that YOU can achieve this for your business. You don’t need to be a professional marketeer to accomplish what Stephanie has done for Elephant in my Handbag… You just need the passion to want to learn.