Whether it’s offline or online, contests are a surefire way to get people’s attention, and this works very well with social media contests. In fact, according to one study, the desire to win was identified as one of the primary factors of motivation.
The desire to win is also the reason why social media contests can be extremely effective at creating excitement among your social media followers. When done right, contests can energize your brand’s fans, raise brand awareness through social media shares, and get people interested in your products and services.
As with any other type of contest, the premise of a social media contesocial media contestsst is simple: offer something of value in exchange for a desirable action.
Steps for successful social media contests
Are you looking to start your own social media contests but aren’t sure where to start? Here are a few pointers.
1. Figure out your social media contests goal
When planning your social media contest, you need to determine what you want to get out of it.
In the early days of social media, getting more ‘likes’ or followers was considered a top goal, but it turns out that ‘likes’ don’t necessarily help your bottom line, hence why they’re referred to as vanity metrics—what good does having 10 thousand followers do when only less than five percent of them are your customers?
Instead, choose a specific goal (or goals) that will directly improve your business. For example. Shake Shack’s Say Cheese(burger)! Photo Contest had the goal of developing brand advocates and boosting user engagement by encouraging user-generated content on their Facebook page.
Other goals you can shoot for include:
- Turning followers into leads
- Turning followers and leads into sales
- Increasing social shares to increase brand awareness
- Pushing a new product or service
- Upselling a complementary product or service next to a popular offering
2. Choose your prize
A social media promotion needs to have a compelling prize that’s both attention-grabbing and relevant to your brand—after all, it wouldn’t make sense for Starbucks to offer heavy equipment as a prize.
At the same time, a prize that’s too flashy may grab people’s attention, but they may end up focusing on the prize itself and not the brand. This may defeat your goal of generating high-quality leads (i.e. people who can actually be your customers) or increasing sales.
The possibilities are endless when it comes to prizes. Eggo did a particularly good job of balancing relevance, engagement, and a compelling prize into a contest that offered $10,000 to the lucky person who submitted a waffle recipe.
3. Pick a social media platform
Next, choose the social network (or networks) to run your promotion and accept social media contestsentries. You can either run it on the channel you think is most relevant to your goal or do it simultaneously on multiple networks. Again, this depends entirely on your circumstances and goals.
For example, an organization serving a B2B market may find it better to promote a contest on LinkedIn.A B2C company, on the other hand, may be better off on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter—social networks where ordinary consumers go. You can learn more through the tools like Jarvee which comes with years of experience on social media and customer management.
4. Choose a contest entry structure
Another thing you should consider is how you want to structure your social media contests entries. Common contest formats include:
- Photo contests
- Video contests
- Sweepstakes
- Voting
- Like the page/post, share, and/or comment
There are no hard and fast rules here, only things to consider when running certain types of social media contests. For example, a photo contest needs to have specific rules to ensure that entries are relevant and accurate. It’s also a good idea to have a lead generation form for entrants to fill out before submitting a photo—this approach is also great for sweepstakes.
5. Brush up on the rules
Before you set up your social media contests, be sure to understand the legal requirements and rules the different social media networks have in place for social media contests. For example, Facebook isn’t keen on contests that promote post sharing or tagging other users to win.
Read more about the social media contests rules on the different sites below:
Set up your social media contests for success
Last but not least, be sure to promote your social media contests as on all owned media channels you own as well as the channels you can pay for and earn. A contest is only as good as the engagement and activity it generates, so be sure to go out and make sure people are excited in your promotion.
