The idea of running a contest on social media can be a fantastic method to boost the number of followers, engagement, leads, and awareness of your brand.
You must set the correct goals, think of a new approach, and ensure it’s consistent with your branding. There’s also the technical aspect, like creating partnerships with influencers and ensuring you’re adhering to the rules of contests for every social network.
What Is a Contest on Social Media
Social media competitions are a type of campaign conducted on social media that promotes participation, followers lead, and branding awareness with the promise of prizes and incentives.
It is possible to encourage your followers to comment, like, and share your posts; in return, you could give them something they’ll enjoy. This will not only expand your reach but also helps get more people talking about your brand.
Contests can also help users engage with your brand in a creative and fun manner. For instance, you can ask your followers to post their favorite photo of your product or think of an original caption for a blog post.
Here’s a guideline of the six ingredients you’ll require before launching your ideal social media contest.
1. The Right Social Platform
The first thing to determine is where you’d like to organize your contest. Do you intend to utilize Facebook to expand your reach for your brand? Perhaps Instagram is the better choice for those who are visual-oriented?
The world of contests has kept pace with the development of social media (and social media platforms) in recent years. Therefore, the issue of which platform to choose is totally up to you.
2. Identify Your Social Media Audience
Social marketing through media is all about the ability to speak and interact with your people, who eventually turn into customers.
If you’re not putting at the beginning of understanding your audience, the subsequent steps may be disastrous. Create personas for your audience, which can be nothing but a more in-depth understanding of the demographics.
3. Timeline
Here is the place to manage all the aspects of the competition on social media. The best way to do this is to start working backward from when you plan to announce the winners.
From there, determine when judging begins and ends (if appropriate), when entries are due, when they open for access when the promotion starts, and other important dates.
Make sure you account for the time required to develop your creative contest and then get approval for the contest’s rules, as well as any other obstacles within the organization you have to address before the launch.
4. Editorial Calendar
This is where you can map your (via Excel, a custom Google calendar, or your software for managing social media) every post on social media, email messages, support for advertising, and other messages about your campaign. You don’t have to create all of the messages beforehand, but your legal team might need to know it’s a good idea.
Be aware you’re running a social media campaign (and the associated communications) that includes five phases: prelaunch, launch, last chance, final chance, and the winners. It is essential to plan multiple messages across several platforms for each stage.
5. A Wide-Reaching Promotional Strategy
If you think that once you’ve reached the “launch contest,” you can relax, put your feet at your desk, and let the submissions pour into my mailbox, I’ll need to get you up to confront the reality.
People can’t simply learn about your contest, which is not how it operates. Social sharing provides a means to get in touch with your fans and let them know about the contest, but it’s not enough to promote your contest.
Any strategy you can think of to market your contest to potential, as well as existing fans is something you must be implementing.
6. Visually Appealing
Video content has become the hottest popular social media content. Videos, Images, Infographics, memes, GIFs, etc . are an excellent way to communicate your company’s information. They are more easily understood by your audience and always get a good response.
This is because they attract easily distracted viewers, so bite-sized pieces of information perform much better than solely text-based information. So, take advantage of various tools, resources, and free sources. to produce visual content that will entice your viewers and give you that advantage over your competitors.
Other Ingredients
A Third Party Contest App
A third-party contest software will be the main component if you’re trying to collect any information through your event. Third-party contest software allows you to quickly design and create the perfect contest to meet your business’s requirements.
They offer the option of voting and sharing built into their software and the capability to manage and track contest entries. A reliable third-party app can also collect information about current fans and save the data in an exportable CRM, which means you can use your contest to earn an actual return.
Rules
I intentionally included legal and rules 10th on the list as I’ve discovered that it’s much simpler to have legal experts weigh over the entire scope of the contest (including seeding, editorial, and amplifiers) in one go rather than taking a look at the prizes and mechanism first before going back to them later for an additional round of questions regarding the other components.
Like designers, you can make legal tasks easier by providing them with all the information upfront. Do your research on the rules for each venue that allow contests. Make sure you have your links ready for legal. (Here are Facebook’s Pages Terms.) This will make them satisfied, and you would like to keep them happy.
A Realistic Timeline
If you don’t set specific dates for your contest’s various milestones and launches, you’re likely to be in a tense contest saga. Begin by determining when the deadline for your contest is, and then go backward from there. Then you’ll have an idea of when to start your contest (based on the time frame you’d like it to run) and when to begin promoting the contest.
It is crucial to determine the day on which the ad campaigns begin and finish, when email notifications will go out to your list of contacts regarding this contest, and when you’ll reveal the winner on your various social media platforms.
Conclusion
With the pressure to be noticed on social media, the challenge of keeping your followers interested in your business’s social media accounts is real, and it’s not over.
Alongside the clever use of pictures, companies often resort to contests on social media and promotions to generate interest and engagement from their customers.