https://www.clementmarfo.com/schools-tour.htm

Throughout May, June and July Clement Marfo & The Frontline embarked on an extensive tour performing at schools around Britain. To engage all the kids that saw them live, we launched a campaign to get the band back for a second show.

Discussing various options with Ashley Sykes and Alex Burford, we settled on the best way to run the promotion. Fans used a Facebook like button to vote for their school to get a second round.

The theory is easy enough, I’ve done Facebook voting systems before. The twist with this one was to create a leaderboard with the most liked schools as the top.

I wrote the system in php with all the tour details stored in a mySQL database.

Each event is given a unique ID which is appended to a querystring on the competition page. By doing this, all likes will post a link back to https://www.clementmarfo.com/schools-tour.htm but the unique ID attributes each like to a different event.

Before loading, the page checks a timestamp to ensure that api requests aren’t made too often. It then sends a request to the Facebook api to retrieve like counts for each event url. These values are stored in the mySQL database and used to rank the schools according to their like-count.

To spread the word even further I created customised sharing links for Facebook and Twitter. These links would include the name of the school and a message to vote for them.

The campaign worked incredibly well with loads of kids voting for a second visit to their school, spreading the word amongst their Facebook friends with each like.