By Dustin Brock 
A social media contest is an excellent opportunity to increase the reach of your products, services and brand. The success of a social media contest does not depend on the number of followers but on the number of people participating in that particular contest. Introducing promotions, giveaways, contests and sweepstakes is an efficient way to create awareness about your brand and the services you offer.
Advantages of Social Media Contest
Brand Engagement
It is an essential aspect. The number of people liking the page is not a relevant factor. Instead, the number of people your content reaches or engages with them matters. By creating a social media contest, one can increase brand engagement.
Re-Marketing Opportunities
One great way is to ask the participants about their information in a necessary field, like asking them to enter their email ids. By this, you will get a list of emails of individuals. Companies can use such lists later, even after the contest, for the purpose of re-marketing. It will help you in engaging with potential customers.
Increased Brand Assets
You will get various brand assets to promote customer interactions with your brand. Brands can do it by engaging with the audience through content created by people, such as text, videos, images or audio. With the permission of the user, one can promote the content on different online platforms for advertising. There can be photo-sharing contests or testimonials in which customers can give reviews of the product or service they used by your brand. One can also update the website to automatically share the user-generated content with the people by keeping in mind the limitations and interests of the brand. One can filter the content manually to avoid any illegal content being published on the website.
Cross Channel Brand Promotion
The main focus of creating contests or giveaways is to increase the brand’s awareness and reach. Ensure that the PR team works hard to support the promotion and efforts before and after the launch. One must well prepare the team if the contest is presented in the press. The PR team should help with the promotional methods of different marketing channels. They will spread awareness and help you to achieve the goal. Encourage people on different social networking sites like Facebook, instagram or Twitter to participate in the contest. Hence, it will lead the audience to engage through different social pages of your brand.
Tips for Running the Online Contest
- Define the goals of your campaign as there can be many reasons to launch a campaign but picking a central objective of marketing is essential. Objectives like creating awareness of the brand, gaining new followers, growing the email database, creating recognition of a new product or service, collecting a list of interested individuals for a particular product and encouraging the audience to participate in the social networking pages of the brand.
- Define your target audience by identifying the people it will appeal to the most. Knowing the audience will give you a clear view of your objectives and decide the prizes or theme related to the promotion.
People will be more interested if they get to see a funny theme instead of a general one. Before deciding on your theme, research the contests by other brands and take inspiration from the themes used by them. - Choose the type of social media contest to run, like a hashtag contest, sharing any photo or video or many more. Choose a relevant contest that matches your company’s marketing goals and will lead to more engagement. You can make low or high efforts for the creation of the contest. But, that must also align with the worth of the prizes.
- Make a schedule and set a reasonable timeline for the contest by which participants can participate, and you will be able to make the arrangements. Avoid long duration of contests as people might find them boring. Hence, go for short contests that spread more quickly and are engaging for the individuals.
Think of creative ideas to build your contest. The contest can either be short or long and can also have prizes. Hire a social media manager to develop unique ideas for engaging the potential audience. You can create contests like creating a product, creating a video to promote the product by a tagline, sharing stories of personal experience, or a photo contest regarding the product or services offered. - Share the contest by promoting it on your company’s website, Facebook, blog page, Twitter, instagram or other mediums like print, television, radio, and newspapers. The contest should be attached with a share button by which people can share a link with their other friends or family to engage and win prizes. Therefore, the contest will go viral.
- Offer people winning prizes as it will increase their interest in participating in the competition. The prizes can be either one of the company’s services or anything relevant to the brand. Like a vacation trip, any electronic item (mobile phone, TV, iPad etc.), or to get featured in the brand’s commercial. Always think of something unique to keep as the prize because it will encourage them to win the prize offered by your brand.
You can also partner with other co-sponsors to promote the business together and reach potential customers. - Plan specific rules about your contest and make them visible to all the contestants participating in the contest. The rules should be easily understood by the people joining the contest. Go through the guidelines mentioned in the contest section for a particular social platform and follow the same while making the rules of your contest.
- Once the contest is finished, announce the winners as people eagerly wait for them. That is why keep the contest short to maintain the interest of the people in the contest. Use social sites to promote the winner and also interact with the people through comments to make it more engaging.
Through social media contests, businesses can gain brand recognition and online presence. Prepare your brand’s contest after planning and researching for a successful outcome. Once you announce the contest, keep updating people regularly about it, as it will interest them and remind them to take part in the campaign. Later, use a social media tracking tool to know about the conversions, website traffic, sales and brand engagement. You can also send emails by the feature of auto-response to the participants to keep them engaged and turn them into the company’s customers.