Best Practices For Using a Social Media Contest To Grow Your Brand.
Today the amount of users on social media platforms are massive. Most companies might already have a large social media following. But how do you get those users off the social media platform and onto your personal website and buying products or seeing your message? One way to do that is to have a social media contest. It is a great way for new companies to stand out in the market and definite themselves from their competition. For more established companies it’s a great way to gain brand loyalty and gain your customers attention.
Here are some common goals that most companies or organizations have when running a social media contest.
- Build brand recognition for your organization or business
- Boost engagement on your social media profiles
- Gain more followers for your social media accounts
- Increase your blog traffic
- Increase the number of subscribers for your email list
Best Practices to Run Social Media Contest
- Keep your campaign focused by setting a goal
- To start, make sure that you set clear goals for your contest so you know exactly what you’re working towards. As you’re designing and building the competition, you can make clear decisions that help you achieve that specific goal. For example, if you want to get more subscribers to your email newsletter, then you might make the email action mandatory, show it at the top of the ‘Ways to Enter’ list, and make it worth more points than every other entry method.
- Set enough time to promote your campaign
- Plan your campaign well ahead of time, so you can start promoting the content before publishing it. In this way, you can spread the word across all your social media channels and create a sense of excitement.
- Add prize pictures and graphics
- Images are a great way to grab the user’s attention. If your contest has a valuable prize then adding photos helps people to visualize it, which will get you more entries. However, not all prizes are physical. For example, you may be offering a membership subscription or an online course. In this case, you can make your own banners and images.
- Promote your contest with on-site retargeting
- You’ll want to make sure that the people who visit your site know about your contest. You can do this by making popups and floating banners on your website.
- Follow social media platform rules for contests
- Each social media platform has its own rules when it comes to promoting contests. For example, on Twitter you can’t encourage users to retweet the same thing over and over again. Similarly, if you are running a Facebook contest, then you can’t present your content in a way that looks like it’s endorsed by Facebook. No matter what social media platforms you use, it’s always a good idea to clearly state that the social media platforms aren’t involved in the contest, or liable for any actions that participants take. You should also publish eligibility criteria and information about who can participate in your social media contest.
