You wish to create a buzz round your corporation. Social media platforms have the facility that will help you attain new audiences and develop your corporation.
And social media contests for small companies generate demand by getting folks enthusiastic about your model, rising the speed they’re speaking about you and sharing your content material.
That is the way you get began.
Do giveaways work on social media?
Sure. Giveaways do work on social media — in case your objective is to generate extra social media engagement and drive visitors.
Almost 65% of survey respondents think about social media giveaways and contests to be efficient for rising followers, and roughly 34% of recent clients are acquired by contests.
Actually, a latest examine by EasyPromos reveals that Fb giveaways generate 1,000% extra interactions than different Fb posts, whereas Instagram accounts that maintain contests develop a mean of 70% quicker than different Instagram accounts.
Why social media contests are efficient
Social media contests invite engagement and interplay. They will additionally provide an thrilling alternative for contest individuals. Whereas the common contest prize prices an organization about $369 — not an enormous advertising funding — a $300 to $400 prize is usually a huge deal for a person.
When somebody enters a contest on social media, over 62% of them will particularly share contest particulars with a pal to encourage them to enter the competition as properly. Within the advertising business, we name this “word-of-mouth promoting” and it accounts for roughly 13% of all buyer gross sales. It’s because individuals are 90% extra seemingly to purchase from a model advisable by a pal.
Contests can even show you how to generate leads, improve model visibility, and interact your viewers. And these advantages will proceed properly after your contest ends.
Roughly 1 in 3 contest individuals say that they’re open to receiving promotional details about the model that held the competition. That signifies that social media giveaways even give you an avenue for rising your e mail listing.
Parts of an efficient social media contest
For a social media contest to be efficient, it has to excite individuals and hook up with your model in a logical approach, whereas following the principles of the platform.
To ensure your social media contest is efficient, do the next:
Know the principles
Whether or not you select to run your contest on one or a number of channels, it’s essential to learn the social media platform’s guidelines for operating a contest earlier than you get began.
Fb, for instance, has just lately carried out rigorous guidelines for operating contests on its platform. In the meantime, different platforms like Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok every have barely totally different guidelines and rules for operating contests.
Maintain it on-brand
Tie your contest in together with your model as a lot as doable. This contains each the kind of contest you run and the prize.
For instance, it is perhaps unusual for a automobile dealership to run a contest inviting folks to strive on a brand new set of headphones or to provide away jewellery. However, it would make sense for a dealership to ask folks to take a check drive and submit about it, or to supply a brand new automobile as a contest prize.
Bear in mind, one objective of operating a social media contest is to extend consciousness of your model. The extra you may say about your model whereas operating the competition, the simpler this advertising technique might be.
Make it thrilling
Generate demand by making your contest as attractive as doable.
This could embrace something from utilizing an attention-grabbing graphic, making a problem that needs to be shared, encouraging engagements by providing to extend the prize because the variety of contestants will increase, or providing a singular or precious prize that may excite your goal market.
The right way to run a social media contest
Don’t be nervous. Observe these 4 steps to create a robust contest that engages your viewers and attracts in new leads:
- Set targets
- Decide the competition particulars
- Resolve the place to run it
- Put it up for sale
Step 1: Set targets to your social media contest
Step one to operating a social media contest is to set SMART targets and decide the important thing efficiency indicators (KPIs) you propose to trace all through the competition.
Having a particular, measurable objective as you head into your social media contest lets you consider its success when the competition is over. This data-first technique makes it simpler to enhance your advertising efforts and helps future contests have extra success.
Some concepts for targets to set embrace:
- Variety of contestants entered
- Variety of likes in your posts
- Variety of shares in your posts
- Variety of clicks by to your web site
In the event you plan to run your social media contest on a number of channels, observe successes for every channel as a way to determine the place to speculate your money and time sooner or later.
Step 2: Decide contest particulars
The following step is to find out particular particulars to your social media contest.
As you brainstorm potential contest concepts, remember the weather of efficient contests from above — following the principles, conserving it on-brand, and making it thrilling.
You’ll additionally wish to take into consideration the factors for profitable the competition. Do you wish to consider every contest entry, or does everybody who enters get their identify put right into a drawing?
Lastly, you’ll wish to choose a prize to your contest. The objective is to your prize to be attractive sufficient to attract folks into your contest, with out costing greater than you’ll make in income. Set a finances. Then, brainstorm totally different on-brand contest prizes that may curiosity your target market.
Step 3: Resolve the place to run your social media contest
When you’ve determined the kind of contest you’re going to run, you may decide which social media platform to make use of.
One efficient technique is to run your contest concurrently on a number of social media channels. Many manufacturers — round 45% — like operating contests on each Fb and Instagram on the similar time.
Having your contest on a number of channels can improve the quantity of publicity it will get. Nonetheless, you additionally run the danger of getting the identical individual enter into the competition a number of instances, which may be onerous to maintain observe of on the again finish.
Some contests additionally run higher on sure platforms over different platforms.
For instance, Instagram depends closely on photographs, so image-heavy contests will carry out higher there than text-heavy contests.
Step 4: Promote your social media contest
You possibly can both let your social media contest unfold organically or your pays to promote it.
Roughly half of all manufacturers select to speculate cash to publicize their occasions. On common, paid promotions for contests value about $0.18/click on.
However even should you’re not prepared to pay for ads, you will discover inventive methods to promote your social media occasion.
For instance, require individuals to share your content material on their social media web page, which might improve your contest’s visibility.
E-mail advertising additionally gives a viable approach to promote your contest to your present viewers. Since individuals who enter contests will share it on their social media web page nearly 95% of the time, you stand a very good probability of getting your contest attain extra folks, simply by partaking together with your present leads.
One other approach to promote your social media contest is to create a singular hashtag to be used when contestants focus on your contest. This could encourage word-of-mouth promotion and enhance model recognition concurrently.
How lengthy it’s best to run a social media contest
The length of your social media contest will partly depend upon how typically you run contests. As a normal rule of thumb, essentially the most profitable contests final anyplace from 25-60 days. Nonetheless, the common social media contest solely lasts about 7 days.
One motive for this discrepancy is that many manufacturers select to make use of contests as a frequent promoting instrument. About 33% of manufacturers select to run a giveaway as soon as a month, whereas 29% of manufacturers run giveaways lower than as soon as a month however a number of instances a 12 months. For these manufacturers, a brief contest is sensible.
In the event you run one to 2 contests per 12 months, it is sensible to have an extended contest interval. This can give your marketing campaign the time it must generate buzz.
Efficient social media contest concepts
Listed here are some nice social media contest concepts, damaged down by which channel they’d finest carry out on.
Fb contest concepts
Fb content material does finest when it has photographs or movies. However in contrast to many different social media platforms, it nonetheless depends closely on textual content. Which means that text-based challenges run properly on Fb.
One instance of a text-based contest is a fill-in-the-blank problem. On this problem, you create a sentence, leaving a clean for purchasers to fill in. For instance, a fill-in-the-blank problem may need a sentence like: “One factor I’m trying ahead to this summer time is _______.”
A wordplay Fb contest is one other enjoyable one. You would possibly ask folks what number of phrases they’ll make utilizing simply the letters in your model’s identify. Otherwise you would possibly see who can generate the most effective poem together with your model identify, with every line of the poem beginning with a special letter of your model’s identify.
Instagram contest concepts
Instagram is a channel that focuses largely on photographs, although it generally pairs these photographs with prolonged captions. So, it’s no shock that a number of the best contests to run on Instagram are image-based.
One problem that’s all the time enjoyable is to submit a picture with no clarification and problem individuals to provide you with humorous captions. The competition winner is the one who comes up with the most effective picture caption by the point your deadline ends.
One other nice Instagram contest concept includes asking contestants to take an image of themselves together with your product and rewarding the individual with essentially the most fascinating picture. This contest concept has the additional advantage of producing lots of usable product photographs that you could then repurpose for later advertising efforts.
Pinterest contest concepts
Pinterest is exclusive as a result of it behaves half as a social media platform and half as a search engine. For that reason, it may be tough to run an ordinary contest on Pinterest. However this doesn’t imply it’s best to neglect the platform you probably have a very good contest concept.
One well-liked Pinterest contest is “pin it to win it.”
With this contest, you share a sequence of photographs, and individuals who wish to enter the competition are required to pin their favourite picture. That is efficient as a result of it’s comparatively simple to trace who pins your photographs, and it additionally serves to get your picture on extra Pinterest boards. You can also make the “pin it to win it” format extra partaking by inviting customers to create distinctive Pinterest boards on a subject associated to your model.
Suggestions contests additionally work properly on Pinterest. This includes posting a picture of a product you provide, in addition to a thought-provoking survey query. Contributors enter the competition by answering the query with real suggestions about your organization or product. This may be a good way to mix operating a contest with generating buyer suggestions.
Twitter contest concepts
Twitter thrives on short-form textual content content material, so the most effective contests to run on Twitter contain brief snippets of textual content.
One choice is to run a trivia contest on Twitter.
The trivia can happen over the course of a number of days, and every tweet your organization sends out may be one trivia query. If the trivia questions are onerous sufficient, the winner(s) could be these with essentially the most appropriate solutions. If in case you have simpler trivia questions, you would possibly take everybody who received a sure share of questions proper and enter their names right into a drawing.
Another choice for a Twitter contest is to create a web-based scavenger hunt utilizing Twitter posts as clues.
The primary individual to determine the clues and return to you with the proper data could be the winner of the competition. This may be an interesting approach to announce a brand new product, particularly if every set of clues directs customers to a single phrase, and people phrases spell out the identify of the brand new product you’re planning to launch.
YouTube contest concepts
YouTube makes use of long-form video content material. Customers from across the globe watch a whopping 1 billion hours of YouTube movies on daily basis, making it a treasure trove for entrepreneurs.
The simplest — and hottest — model of a YouTube contest invitations individuals to subscribe to your channel to enter the competition. This may be nice should you’re particularly trying to develop your YouTube viewers.
One other nice concept is a “recommend a subject” competitors. This model of a contest may help you generate new concepts for YouTube content material. The perfect half is that, since your viewers are suggesting the subjects, you recognize forward of time that they’ll have an interest within the content material.
TikTok contest concepts
Though a comparatively new platform, TikTok has been taking off in recent times. It makes a speciality of short-form video content material, initially with movies not than 15 seconds. Whereas their most video size has since elevated, brief and candy movies are nonetheless the bread and butter of this social media platform.
One of many nice issues about TikTok is that it invitations everybody to grow to be a content material creator. Because of this, probably the greatest contest varieties you may host on TikTok invitations individuals to movie some kind of video response to your content material.
You would possibly concern a problem and ask individuals to movie themselves trying the problem. Problem failures are sometimes simply as enjoyable as successes. You possibly can capitalize on that by coming into all individuals right into a sweepstakes, quite than solely rewarding the profitable makes an attempt.
Positivity challenges additionally run properly on TikTok.
For instance, you may need individuals enter by recording a optimistic message, doing a contented dance, or displaying off one thing that makes them completely happy. GymShark 66 gives an awesome instance of a positivity problem that works. They problem their followers to create three health guidelines for themselves, stick with these guidelines on daily basis for 66 days, and submit their journey.
Plan your first social media contest right now
Operating a social media contest is usually a nice demand technology technique for entrepreneurs. Contests help you attain bigger audiences, in a largely natural approach, whereas creating hype round your model. Better of all, the price of operating a contest is comparatively low.
Begin right now by figuring out which channels you wish to run a contest on and familiarizing your self with every platform’s contest guidelines and tips. Then, have some enjoyable brainstorming together with your group. Take the social media contest concepts talked about above as a very good supply of inspiration to launch your first profitable contest.
