Running a social media contest offers a fantastic opportunity to create excitement and enthusiasm around your brand, which in turn increases email subscribers, bumps up your Twitter following, boosts your Facebook likes and generally creates a positive atmosphere for your business.
Listed below are 6 ways to run the most successful social media contest imaginable:
1. Know exactly what you want
Before beginning your campaign, it’s essential to know exactly what you want from it. Are you looking to expose a particular product? Or gain more Twitter followers? Perhaps you want to increase brand awareness or enhance your email subscriptions? You need to know your exact reasons for carrying out the campaign before getting started.
2. Select the type of contest you want to run
There are plenty of different types of contests to choose from, including sweepstakes, photo contests, video contests and more. Photo and video contests with fan votes have been proven to generate the greatest amount of engagement. There are also quiz and caption contests, where winners are randomly selected or voted for by other people. Pinterest has numerous ‘Pin it to Win it’ contests which will give you plenty of ideas to choose from.
3. How long will your contest run for?
Next, you need to determine the duration of the contest. If it’s a video or photo contest, you can stretch it out for longer by having various rounds. If you’re on a limited budget, run a flash contest, which is usually run for a 24 hour period or less every few weeks. This has been proven to bring in bursts of engagement, without running your marketing budget on low.
4. Where will you run your contest?
Next, you need to decide which platforms you are going to run your contest on, whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram or a selection of these. It’s recommended to run your campaign on a single platform first although you can certainly cross-promote it if you believe it will be successful on multiple platforms.
5. Create something catchy
The next task is to make your campaign fun, attractive and interesting. You want as many people as possible to get involved, and you can do this by creating something eye-catching during the design stages and also by combining your campaign with incentives (e.g. 'win a money-off voucher' etc.).
6. Promote away!
No campaign is a successful campaign without decent promotion. Consider paid options on Facebook and Twitter to really spread out about your contest. Use a hashtag for the contest that can be used across all platforms that is fun and memorable. Finally, have clear rules in place so that people submit their entries fairly. For instance, if you are running a contest where the winner is the individual with the most number of likes, make sure you specify that multiple votes from a single IP address will not be accepted.
Running contests is a fun and interactive way to drive engagement and increase awareness of your brand. With a bit of planning and creativity, your next contest will go a very long way!
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