href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/79337156@N00/754875204"> class="zemanta-img-inserted zemanta-img-configured alignright" title="Southwest Airlines" src="http://sazbean.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/754875204_19d36951d3.jpg" alt="Southwest Airlines" width="200" height="150" />

Frequent flyers missed out on a great deal with Southwest Airlines on Friday August 3rd if they didn’t catch the news of their half-off fall flights deal on Twitter, Facebook or Mashable. To celebrate reaching the impressive number of 3 million fans on Facebook, Southwest offered 50% off certain fall flights for fans that booked on that Friday.

The Facebook promotional deal applied only to certain round-trip flights called “Wanna Get Away” flights for the dates September 5th, 11th, 18th, 25th, October 2nd, 31st, and November 6th. Facebook fans of Southwest needed to use the code “LUV2LIKE” with their bookings before midnight on that Friday at southwest.com. id="more-10489">

There are a number of things to learn from Southwest’s example. Using social media success to create engagement and ultimately generate sales is a great way to promote your brand and increase your fan base. Not only did Southwest celebrate an important milestone – 3 million Facebook fans – but they also made sure to thank their fans and reward them for their support. Something else that can be taken away from Southwest’s example is how to respond in a situation when things go wrong. With the overwhelming number of fans trying to take advantage of this offer, the company’s website suffered performance issues and had some customers mistakenly get charged multiple times for their bookings. Instead of letting these bumps in the road get in the way, Southwest held its composure and kept fans updated on Facebook about solving website issues and reimbursing customers. They even acquired almost 150,000 more fans following the promotion. Despite having some challenges along the way, Southwest was successful in their social media marketing promotional campaign.

So what can you take away from Southwest Airlines to help your business? Celebrate social media successes, get your customers involved and create promotions that drive sales as well as buzz to deliver ROI from your successes.

In this weeks episode of the Future of Engagement, Murray Newlands further discusses Southwest’s successful marketing campaign and what you can learn from its example for your brand.

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Highlights:

• Social Media Marketing
• Increasing Engagement
• Generating Sales

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The social media monitoring tool href="http://en.en.alerti.com/features" rel="nofollow">Alerti was used to make the graph above that shows the peak in conversation about Southwest with their promotional code offer. Alerti is a great tool for bloggers since it lets them see what people are saying on certain topics through different social media platforms

If you are interested in doing social media monitoring for yourself, click on the white paper below.

href="http://www.murraynewlands.com/social-media-monitoring-white-paper" rel="nofollow">Social Media Monitoring White Paper

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