Running a Social Media Contest Part One
Social media contests can fuel demand by getting people engaged and excited about your brand and your offerings. Following a process will ensure you are optimizing your contest strategy.
Running a Social Media Contest Part One
Social media contests can fuel demand by getting people engaged and excited about your brand and your offerings. Following a process will ensure you are optimizing your contest strategy.
Social Media Giveaways Do Work
When people participate in social media contests, on average, over 62% have been known to share the contest details with others. Word of mouth advertising accounts for 13% of all sales across all industries. Contests create lead generation opportunities, increase awareness and can drastically grow your social communities.
Here are some various other stats from multiple surveys from different sources.
One week after participating in a contest, participants showed a 42% increase in spending on the brand versus previous spending levels.
Contest emails have the highest open rate at 45%.
Facebook and Instagram contests receive 3.5 times as many Likes and 64 times as many comments as regular posts.
Over half of organizations that run contests do them across multiple social platforms simultaneously. This keeps your communities engaged and make creative and content creation easier for your social media teams.
Maybe your Instagram channel needs a boost in community growth? You could single out Instagram for a contest.
Your Objectives
It can be daunting to know where to start. What is possible? What should you focus on? It’s easier to start with a simple goal targeting your social community to encourage engagement, Likes/Follows, comments or product photos/videos.
You can get your “feet wet” with the process and branch out from there.
Look for giveaways in the platforms where you want to run your own promotions. Use appropriate hashtags like #giveaway, #win, #contest and see what shows up. Then carefully review the contest posts for media, messaging and content specific information.
You won’t have trouble finding contests! I just searched Instagram using the hashtag “#contest” and 12.4M posts showed up!
This can be a great and fast way to get up to speed on social giveaways. Enter some of the contests and think like a marketer. Make it a fun project. You’ll quickly get the gist of the process and how to approach them.
What is the company doing to make this contest exciting? What are the rules to win? (such as post, comment, Like, etc.). What is the call to action? How long does the contest run? Is the sponsor driving traffic to a landing page or is the contest participation exclusively on the social platform?
What Will You Need to Create, Maintain and Measure Your Contest?
When I used to run social media contests for companies in the musical instrument and recording industries, I would create a marketing brief that had all the information I needed to launch, maintain and measure the contest. I also included the content and copy I wanted to add in the post itself, destination site page links,URL tagging for data tracking and the contest specifics such as when it starts and ends and when and where a winner will be announced. This way while you are logged in to the platform, everything you need is at your fingertips. It makes things much easier.
The Prize is SO Important
When Facebook was young, I saw many companies running contests giving away iPods and iPhones. I never understood this because these companies had nothing to offer remotely related to Apple products. So what happens is you have people entering your contests that just want an unrelated prize. This is not a good investment!
Look for prizes that people will want from your company — because you want to market to these contest participants after the contest. Or at least find related products to what you offer if your products or services are too expensive to giveaway or discount. It’s all about relevancy to your offerings because these entrants will soon be your leads for sales.
Platform-Specific Apps
Platform apps are an easy and effective way to get started because they are built to allow you to get your contest up and running quickly. They adhere to the rules and policies of the social platforms, and they provide advice on setting up and running your contests.
There are many. Shortstack has been around for quite a while now and one I used to use so it’s a tried-and-true long term solution. Gleam has been around a while too.
Don’t Learn the Contest App the Day You Want to Launch
I’ve been there on this one. Learn the contest platform BEFORE you want to launch the contest. I’ve been very frustrated trying to figure out why an image wasn’t showing up or the redirect page wasn’t working instead of launching the promotion.
Next Time
In the next article we’ll get into some more details about launching your first contest. Until then you might want to search for contests using the appropriate hashtags and just check them out. Enter the ones you want to know more about and take screenshots and notes. And hey, you might win a prize in the process.
