Airtours.se with successful photo contest application on Facebook

Airtours is a Swedish travel company focusing on city holidays and European holiday destinations (http://www.airtours.se). In order to get a lot of people engaged with the brand and Airtours key products, SkandNet Media designed and developed a photo contest in the form of a Facebook application (http://www.skandnet.com/social-media/facebook-applications). In order to promote the contest, Marketplace ads were the main channel.

This campaign was running from April 27 to June 3, 2011 and the results are now ready to be presented.

Airtours had several different objectives with the contest:

1)            To increase the amount of fans from the relevant target group

2)            To increase brand awareness right before the main booking season

3)            To gather email addresses for future use in newsletters

4)            To engage people and to keep them engaged over a month

5)            To  place the concept of a city holiday, as a possible option for the next holiday booking

The contest had basically two steps:

In the first period people could upload a maximum of five photos and vote for the finalists.

Then Airtours selected their ten favorite photos and combined them with the ten photos most voted for by the public. These 20 photos then moved on to the final round.

In the second period Airtours Facebook fans selected the final winners.

Also, on the top list which updated in real time, people could check which photos were leading and how many votes they received.

SkandNet generated around 600 Marketplace ads targeted to Swedish people above 20 years of age. Optimization was mostly done by trying to find Facebook users who in some way love travelling and by working extensively with different images. Also Sponsored Stories turned out exceptionally well, as ads were shown to the friends of people which were already fans of Airtours.

Results

Airtours´ fan base grew from 600 up to 7600 fans in only one month. 6400 people took part in the contest. 1355 photos of high quality were uploaded, and there were over 5000 votes.