How to run a successful social media contest

Running a Social Media contest is a great way to get new followers, collect new emails and increase brand awareness. They also give you the opportunity to engage with potential customers and generate leads.

A well-run social media contest can bring considerable benefits to your company. The key is to create a campaign that gets maximum exposure and engages your audience.

Why Run a Social Media Contest?

A social media contest will benefit you and your business. The most common aims of contests on social media are to increase your social media following and engagement, by expanding this you will lead more people to your business to expand on your email list and interact with your website.

Giving away something free encourages people to interact with your brand. When you give away something free, you generate interest around your brand. People want to know what you have to offer and what they need to do to get something for free, especially if it involves minimal effort. And, if you make it easy for them to find out, even better.

A giveaway or contest gives you the opportunity to build awareness around your brand. In exchange for sharing your content, participants will be in with a chance of winning a prize.

Importance of Social Media for Promotion

Social media has become a permanent fixture in all of our lives. We use it every day. It’s how we communicate with friends, family members, and even complete strangers.

According to recent research conducted by Media Street, 74%of Facebook users sign in to their accounts daily. This means that there are nearly 2 billion people actively using Facebook each month. And according to Nielsen, 91% of adults use social networking sites like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. So social media is in front of so many people, so creating a competition is useful in getting your business in front of more people.

Most, if not every, business is looking to promote their products and services on social media. There are many ways to reach out to audiences of millions of potential customers through social networks like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and others. This makes social media one of the most important marketing channels. But the challenge is reaching those people. That is where a good competition/contest might come in handy.

Read up on contest rules

Before you start promoting your next contest, it pays to know what you are legally allowed to do.

If you don’t follow the rules, you might find yourself getting shut down.

For example, Facebook discourages contests where people must share a post to enter (but this doesn’t mean you can’t use it as an extra entry or friendly request, just as long as the only entry requirement isn’t sharing). Here are Facebooks contest rules –  https://www.facebook.com/policies_center/pages_groups_events

So make sure you read and understand the rules for each contest you plan to run.

You don’t want to get caught out by something unexpected.

Here is a process to run a successful social media contest

1. Decide your goals
2. Understand your audience and who you want to target
3. Choose your structure and message
4. Choose the right tools
5. Measuring the contest
6. Analyse your data to make improvements
7. Announce the winner and reward participants

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Decide your goals

Understand what you want from this social media contest, and think about how you want to portray your business and brand. Think about where you would like to grow more for your business. Create and write down some targets you would like to achieve with this contest e.g. 100 new email contacts or 200 new Instagram followers. But don’t put too much pressure on yourself and think of only 2-3 goals, the first contest will teach you how to improve and how to achieve bigger and better goals the more you learn.

Also when considering this, think about what you want to gain to get enough value for what you’re giving away. An example of this will be having a prize worth £100, but only getting 25 new email addresses. Make sure you understand what you getting for what you are giving away.

Understand your audience and who you want to target

Your giveaway/prize needs to fit into your overall marketing strategy, remember your ideal customer, this is who to target. If you are targeting under 25s, you probably don’t want to run a giveaway on Facebook which has an older age demographic. Likewise, if your target market is baby boomers, it makes sense to focus on your competition on LinkedIn or Twitter. You need to understand which platforms your potential customers will be on, think about their age and which social channels they would look for your products/services on, this will be where you should focus your marketing and budget.

Before launching your giveaway or contest, take some time to research your audience demographic. You need to understand which platforms your potential customers will be on, think about their age and where they would look for your products/services, this will be where you should focus your marketing and budget on.

Choose your structure and message

There are many types of contest requirements you could set for people to be able to qualify to take part. They all depend on what it actually is that you want to achieve.

For example, a requirement to join a contest might be to “tag a friend”, “share to enter”, “like and/or comment to enter”, “sign up for our newsletter with your email address”, etc…

It all depends on your end objective. Some of the most common ones include:

• Getting exposure

• Creating awareness

• Generating leads

• Building relationships

Just make sure it is clear what to do and that anyone can enter.

Choose what to give away

The best part of the contest is choosing the prizes. You want to give something that is useful and relevant to your brand, while still being unique enough to stand out among the crowd.

You don’t want to go overboard either. Too many options can confuse participants and dilute the impact of your campaign.

Here are some tips on how to choose the perfect giveaway:

• Make it exclusive. Don’t give away anything that anyone else could win.

• Choose something that people actually use. For instance, if you’re giving away a product, ask yourself whether someone really needs it.

• Think about the type of person you want to attract. Do you want to reach influencers? Are people interested in tech? People looking for inspiration? etc

• What do you want to achieve? Are you trying to build awareness around a specific topic? Or are you just looking for likes, followers and shares?

Choose the right tools

There are many different options to host a successful contest out there, including Facebook itself. However, if you want to take things up a notch, consider using third-party apps to help automate the process. These apps make it much easier to track participation and measurement. Some examples include Kingsumo, ShortStack, Woobix, and OfferPop. They each offer a variety of features, such as tracking entries, reporting statistics, and generating reports.

Include a Form on a Landing Page to Generate Leads

For most types of contests, you need somewhere people can enter. You need to create an eye-catching, optimised landing page where the entree can fill in their email and any other personal information to enter the contest. For the social media side, there should be required/ extra entries available for someone to complete such as sharing the contest post, following you on social media channels, tagging people in the comments and liking your posts.

Measuring the contest

Evaluate different metrics in accordance with your targets in order to understand and monitor your goals. You may monitor this using a variety of free tools, including Google Analytics, social media insights, and third-party apps, which often have built-in functionality to track data for you.

Another benefit you get from tracking metrics is that it can often necessitate changes for future campaigns. This is because you can learn things about your audience that you didn’t realise. Perhaps you learned that less than 10% of your target audience actually converts. Or perhaps you discovered that a particular demographic isn’t interested in your product. This knowledge can lead to better decisions regarding your brand and messaging moving forward.

Social media analytics

You need social media analytics tools for every stage of your digital marketing strategy. Once you know what your KPIs (key performance indicators) and goals are, it’s important to measure them against your social media metrics. This way, you can adjust and optimize your campaigns for maximum results.

Analyse your data to make improvements

Tracking performance for your campaign helps determine success or failure. Of course, there are many ways to measure performance. You could look at how many people clicked on your ads, what percentage of those clicked on a specific link, etc. What matters most is whether or not the contest achieved the desired outcome.

More so, it can provide insight to help adjust your social marketing strategy even while a campaign runs. If you’re looking to increase conversions, for example, you’ll want to know if certain ad appeals to which audience. And if you’d like to see where your audience is coming from look at the demographics.

Finally, it’s important to note that the metrics you track will depend on your goals, depending on what type of contest you’re running. A tool such as Google Analytics will provide details about traffic sources and their behaviour on your website. In addition, you’ll find out information such as the number of visits, average session duration, bounce rates, etc.

Announce the winner and reward participants

Before you can consider your job done, there’s one final thing you need to do—reward the winner.

You can notify the winner by tagging them in the contest publication and sending them a private message. You can use this content update as part of your content strategy by sharing the winning image/story/video in a public post and letting everyone know who won.

When announcing the winners, use the chance to thank everyone who took part and tell them about your future contests, which means they’ll be motivated to participate again next time and have something exciting to look forward to. You could also create a deal for everyone who enters such as a discount code for your products and services on your website or a little freebie (depending on your and your business) by doing this it gives them an incentive to stay following you and have interest in purchasing something from your business.

At this stage, also encourage them to sign up for your newsletter or follow your Facebook page so they can keep up to date with your latest news and announcements.

When you reach this point, mark the competition as “over” so there won’t be any confusion later. You could alternatively delete your post entirely if you wanted.