It’s no great secret that consumers love promotions. Indeed, it seems that social media and the ability for consumers and brands to engage on Facebook and Twitter has only increased this hunger for promotions, exclusive discounts and giveaways. According to an Ad Age/Ipsos Observer survey of 1,000 participants looking at digital consumption habits, 65 percent of consumers want the brands they follow to offer coupons. Compare that to the 42 percent who said they wanted “enhanced customer service” and you can see that consumers are clearly telling brands “show me the promotions!”.

While there are no hard numbers yet on how effective Facebook and Twitter promotions are, there are plenty of industry stories to back up the claim that they increase engagement and sales. For example, frozen food brand Healthy Choice created a promotion that tapped into social sharing by offering a coupon that increased in value as more people “Liked” its page and signed up to receive the deal. Termed a “progressive coupon”, the voucher increased in value from a 75 cent discount, eventually becoming a two-for-one deal.

The upshot? Healthy Choice saw their connections soar from 6,800 to approximately 60,000 at the time of the study. The brand also had 3 times more user engagement after the promotion than prior, and by offering a newsletter capture field on the coupon signup form, they were able to register approximately 60 percent of connections for their mailing list.

So how can you increase the chances of a positive return on your efforts? You need to execute your promotion in such a way as to encourage maximum engagement. Mashable cites the following tips:

1) Define your goals: In the rush to engage on social media, many brands skip the step of defining their goals, whether its getting more Likes, or driving sales. By having set goals in mind, what you want to gain from the promotion, the better you can design the promotion to reach these goals.

2) Exploit the medium: Remember, Facebook and Twitter are great at spreading promotions at viral rates. Think about how you can design your campaign to take full advantage of this.

3) Set metrics: Make sure you can measure your achievements by setting metrics for them. It’s essential to have your “before figures” prior to starting the campaign.

4) Evaluate and adjust: Also known as “learn from your mistakes.” See what went wrong in your campaign and adjust for the next time.

Want more tips? Read Mashable’s full run-down.

How does a brand make social media a commitment rather than a campaign? In November 2010, marketing consultancy Headstream started a discussion on what makes a brand social and sought to rank the top 100, based on social activity. Any brand could be nominated, and nominations were crowdsourced through Twitter.

Eventually, 100 brands were chosen for the SB 100 awards. The nominations included a diverse range of brands from multi-national social powerhouses like Dell to tiny companies of just a handful of people like Muddy Boots Foods.

Best Buy, a relatively new brand to the UK, (but one that is very well known as a “big box” electronics store in the US) came in fifth, beating out the likes of ASOS and Zappos. Richard Clark, Best Buy’s marketing head in the UK, puts down their high ranking to four main reasons:

1. Create an authentic online community. Best Buy created a core community platform that provides forums for customers and/or general visitors to talk about technology and entertainment related subjects as well as maintaining an active blog. Moreover, it’s not just news on the latest arrivals in store: marketing head Richard Clark has personally covered the likes of Gadget Show Live and interviewed Suzi Perry and Ortis Deley.

2. Reviews. Knowing that most consumers will avidly turn to reviews before they buy an electronic product, Best Buy have reviews coming in from review aggregator Reevoo and from their own panel of TechXperts. Customers can also upload their own review videos.

3. Social Platforms. Best Buy is active on all the major social platforms including Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, tailoring the activity to suit the audience. Their two biggest goals were to keep customers happy: encouraging feedback no matter how difficult, and responding as quickly and thoroughly as possible. They also respond as an employee of the company, rather than as the company itself.

4. Social Commerce: Best Buy has a Facebook store and lets their fans check prices, and look at the latest kit all from Facebook.

The lesson to learn from Best Buy’s quick ascent of the top 100 social brands chart is a simple one: get the social basics right, execute well and with conviction, and rewards will flow in.

Want the long answer? , read more about Best Buy’s social media strategy.

Facebook is currently testing real-time advertising, which if successful could boost the social media giant’s display ad click-through rate, reported to be a mere 0.051% in 2010, half the industry average.

Advertising Age writes that the Facebook is testing the delivery platform of mining real-time conversations to target ads with 1 percent of its users worldwide, a focus group of 6 million people. While the social net has been delivering targeted ads based on wall posts and status updates for some time, they have never done it on a real time basis. How would the ads work? If a user updated their status to say, “Mmm, I could go for some pizza tonight,” they could get an ad or a coupon from Domino’s, Papa John’s or Pizza Hut.

Facebook said that while delivering these ads based on user conversation is a complex algorithm continuously perfected and changed, the real aim of this test is see if the ads can be served “at split-second speed,” just as soon as the user makes a statement that is a match for an ad in the system. As AdAge.com notes, “The moment between a potential customer expressing a desire and deciding on how to fulfill that desire is an advertiser sweet spot, and the real-time ad model puts advertisers in front of a user at that very delicate, decisive moment.”

Read the full Adage.com story here.