Do you want people to talk about your business? Undoubtedly, social media can help you expand your customer base and, ultimately, your revenue.
The effectiveness of a social media campaign is no longer measured by the number of new followers you get but by the amount of interaction your company receives from existing followers. Spreading awareness of your brand to new people through social media contests, promotions, sweepstakes, and freebies is a growing trend.
In addition, social media contests for businesses boost demand by raising brand awareness, conversation, and shares.
There is a great deal of organization and forethought required due to the many regulations and requirements. You want to ensure you're using a contest to its full potential so that it helps expand your audience, boost site traffic, and bring in new prospects.
This is how you get started.
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Approximately 34% of new customers are obtained through contests, and over 65% of survey respondents believe social media gifts and contests are useful for gaining followers.
The goal of a social media contest is to encourage participation and discussion. Taking part in a contest can be a thrilling experience in itself.
Word-of-mouth advertising, responsible for about 13% of all sales, is a common practice in the marketing sector. This is because word-of-mouth advertising increases sales for suggested brands by 90%.
Lead generation, brand awareness, and audience participation are all achievable goals with the help of a contest. And these advantages will persist long after your competition has over.
One-third of contest participants indicate they are interested in learning more about the sponsoring brand. Therefore, you can use a social media giveaway to increase the size of your email list.
With each successful viral marketing initiative, the value of social media competition and sweepstakes becomes increasingly obvious. Some examples of how your brand might benefit from these advertising and branding chances are as follows:
Brands are interested in how many people see their postings and who reads and reacts to them. Running a contest on social media is a fantastic method to enhance prospects for brand interaction, which is currently an essential metric.
In order to participate in these contests, it is common practice to ask for participants' personal information. The simple act of asking for their email addresses sets the stage for future remarketing efforts. By collecting email addresses from those who entered your sweepstakes, you may stay in touch with them long after the event has concluded.
By encouraging participation from your target demographic, you may amass a wealth of user-generated content (UGC) that showcases authentic interactions between your brand and its target demographic. If you have their approval, you can highlight this material and promote it via various advertising channels.
You might host a photo contest or collect testimonials from satisfied customers on your website or social media pages. Alternatively, you may want to consider integrating these assets with your website so that it is constantly updating to share new UGC with users, depending on your sector.
Your social media giveaways should ultimately serve to increase exposure to and familiarity with your brand. Pushing your promotion over numerous marketing channels is necessary to establish a true omnichannel strategy. Even if the contest is Instagram-only, you should still share it on other social media to get more people involved. The very least it does is help people find their way around your social media profiles and interact with your company.
Before launching your social media strategy, you should keep a few things in mind.
You want your campaign to be well-planned and have a real purpose for your company as we continue to move away from spammy promotions and giveaways. The incentive you're presenting must be both appealing to the target audience and consistent with the brand's values in order to be successful.
More interesting than urging people to give their email addresses for a chance to win a generic reward is the prospect of winning a trip or being featured in a commercial. Customers need a reason to care about this. Therefore, you should provide them with a special prize that they can only acquire by interacting with your business.
When it comes down to it, what do you hope to accomplish? Recognize your ends, then build a game plan to achieve them. Obviously, we want our advertising campaigns to build excitement about the brand as a whole, not just for the current promotion. But if there's a specific outcome you want to see from this campaign for your brand, spell it out so you can work it in.
Some examples of possible targets are as follows:
It's important to monitor the results of your social media competitions across all platforms to determine how best to use your resources moving forward.
Creating a contest that encourages users to submit original material or use a branded hashtag could be the best solution for your company if you have a small content creation team. Realistically assessing the capabilities of your team and the extent to which you will require support from your audience and other resources is essential to running successful social media contests. If you put in the time and effort to plan ahead, you can avoid any hiccups in the middle of your campaign.
As we've already discussed, a number of legal considerations must be taken into account when launching an online contest for your brand. To avoid any unwelcome surprises in running your business, it is wise to plan ahead and consider all possible outcomes. While it goes without saying that your company's next promotion should not violate any laws or constitute spam, there are a few other considerations you should keep in mind.
Verify that your promotion is legitimate and does not violate any rules set forth by the platform on which you intend to host the giveaway. If you want your social media contest to go off without a hitch, you need to familiarize yourself with and adhere to each platform's specific rules and requirements.
To choose the best social media channel to promote your contest, you must first select what kind of contest you will be running. It's a good idea to host the contest on numerous social media platforms all at once.
A wider audience may see your contest if it is promoted across several platforms. On the other hand, duplicate entries from the same person are difficult to track once the event has begun. In addition, some competitions function better on some platforms than others.
Is there a certain item you sell that often sells out quickly? Conduct a social media contest to increase product awareness. The caption you use for your contest entry is a great place to draw attention to the additional benefits of your product. Since social media contests generate so much interest, you should treat them like miniature advertisements for your items.
Those entrants may comprehend why you are the preferred vendor and the value of the gift offered. Participation in your contests, and even sales, will rise as a result.
What's more, user-generated content is just as valuable as a photograph is said to be (UGC). UGC is ten times more effective at gaining consumers' confidence than a brand's own promotional efforts. This is likely the reason why 85% of customers say that user-generated material has more of an impact on them than branded photographs or videos.
It encourages potential buyers to see themselves using a product before making a purchase decision. Use UGC in your social media contest and strategy because it is trusted so much more than traditional advertising.
Promote your brand by having participants tweet user-generated material using designated hashtags. In this approach, keeping tabs on your entries is a breeze. Display the user-generated content elsewhere, such as on your website and landing pages.
Try holding a contest that rewards the participants as well as you. Encourage your social media followers to make a purchase and enter the contest. This strategy can only benefit your company. It attracts customers, visitors, and contestants to your online and offline establishments.
Create an easy-to-follow procedure for participants to enter your social media contest. Because not everyone can afford to drop $50 or $100 to enter a contest, so make sure the spending threshold is low. The more people who can enter your social media contest because of how simple it is, the better.
Both user-generated content and social media reviews are essential. They both strengthen your brand's reputation and attract new clients.
In addition, shoppers typically read ten reviews of a company online before they feel comfortable doing business with it. Creative social media contests are a great way to get people to talk about your product and hear their thoughts.
Offer a free sample or trial size of your goods to those who follow you on social media. It will increase the number of people that participate and share your work. A gift certificate, which the winners can use to purchase anything they like, is one option.
Holding a giveaway in collaboration with a social media influencer is an excellent strategy for increasing brand awareness.
They have a sizable, active following across several platforms, ready to interact with your brand thanks to the influencer's endorsement. Consequently, it's not shocking that influencer marketing has been one of the top three most often used marketing strategies over the previous three years.
Never choose an influencer solely on how many followers they have. The majority of brands lose money in that area. If you want your customers to feel a deeper connection to your business, you need to find an influencer representative of that audience. Keep in mind that only some brands can benefit from the same influencer.
Hashtags are a useful tool for facilitating content discovery on the Internet. If you made a hashtag and want more people to find it, you need to get more people to use it. If you want to increase your hashtag's visibility on social media, you need to encourage people to retweet, include it in their social media contest post, and click on it.
It's easy to make your own branded hashtag. It's important that it's not too difficult to spell or long for people to remember. It takes time for a hashtag to get traction, so keep at it, use it appropriately, and have fun with it.
Boost interest in your contest by making it as appealing as possible to potential participants.
To get your target audience excited, you can use various techniques, such as an attention-grabbing visual, a shareable challenge, an incentive to participate (such as a growing prize pool), or a truly special or valuable award.
Your social media contest can either get traction on its own, or you can invest in paid promotion.
Roughly 50% of all brands spend money advertising their events. There are still ways to get the word out about your social media event, regardless of whether or not you have the budget for paid marketing.
You could make it a condition of entering the contest that participants share your content on their social network profile. Using email marketing to spread the word about your contest to your existing clientele is another great option. Since nearly 95 percent of contest entrants post about the event on their social media profiles, interacting with your current leads can help spread the word about your contest to a wider audience.
Consider including a form on your landing page for people to fill out if one of your goals is to collect email addresses. The registration process for the contest will be simplified as a result. Refrain from forcing contestants to go through reams of regulations or click through multiple pages to get the information they need.
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Here are some fantastic concepts for social media contests, organized according to the platform they would do best on.
Images and videos are especially effective on Facebook. However, unlike many other social networking networks, it still relies primarily on language. This indicates that Facebook is a good platform for text-based competitions.
Text-based competitions can take the form of fill-in-the-blank questions, for instance. An empty statement is left for the consumer to complete. Similarly, a Facebook contest based on clever wordplay is great fun. You may test your audience's wordsmithing skills by having them create as many words as they can from your company's name. You could also hold a contest to see who can develop the finest poem based on your brand, with each line beginning with a different letter of your brand's name.
Instagram is a platform that mostly shares visual content and frequently includes descriptive text. It's no wonder that photo contests are some of Instagram's most popular types.
Posting a photograph with no context and asking others to come up with clever titles is a great approach to testing people's creativity. When the timer runs out, the individual who submitted the best caption for the winning image will be announced as the winner.
One of the most clever social media challenge ideas is to have participants take a photo of themselves using the product and award the winner with a prize. The added bonus of this competition concept is that it will yield many high-quality product photographs that can be used in future advertising campaigns.
Due to the fast pace at which photos are scrolled via Instagram, announcing a single contest may prove ineffective. Get as many people as possible to enter the contest by sharing it on your website and other social media. If you can come up with fresh, engaging content for each update, you can post many times about the contest.
Pinterest is an excellent place to host a contest if your demographic consists primarily of women and you work in a visually-oriented field.
Compared to other social networking sites, Pinterest stands out since it also functions as a search engine. Because of this, organizing a typical contest on Pinterest can be challenging. However, if you have a fantastic concept for a competition, you should pay attention to the site.
Pinterest is an excellent platform for holding feedback contests. You can do this by uploading a picture of a product you sell alongside an interesting survey question. A participant's entry into the contest is their honest opinion of your business or product in response to the question. Combined with a contest, this might be a fantastic method for gathering information about your clientele.
If you're planning on hosting a contest, Pinterest offers some lenient rules:
It is important to inform participants of any special requirements they may have to meet to enter your contest, such as creating a new board or repinning a specific image. Use a pinnable graphic to list the rules in bullet point form. You can include a link to a landing page on your website that describes the contest in greater detail, which will appear below the image.
Since tweets are limited to 280 characters, the most successful Twitter contests focus on these brief messages.
Conducting a Twitter trivia contest is one such solution. Your business's tweets can count as a single trivia question, and the event can span many days. If the trivia questions are challenging enough, the person or people who answer most of them correctly will be declared the winner(s). If the trivia questions are simple enough, you might have a drawing for all participants who got at least a specific proportion correct.
A web-based scavenger hunt using clues from tweets is another possibility for a Twitter competition. Anyone who deduces the answers to your clues and gets back to you first wins the prize. If the goal of each series of clues is to lead consumers to a single word, and those words together spell out the name of the new product you plan to launch, then you have a fun and interesting approach to introducing the product.
It's important to select a contest that fits in with your plans. Twitter users frequently participate in the following types of contests:
You should also decide when the contest will begin, how long it will last, and how it will be announced (will it be announced days in advance on your blog and other social media networks, or will it be announced just minutes before the contest begins). Once you know what you want to accomplish, figuring out the specifics is a breeze.
YouTube favors in-depth video coverage.
The most basic and widely-used kind of YouTube contest simply asks entrants to subscribe to your channel. This could be a terrific strategy if you want to increase your YouTube subscriber base.
Another fantastic idea is a contest in which participants have to come up with a topic. This contest format is great for generating fresh concepts for your YouTube channel. The best social media contests are those where you already know your audience will enjoy the suggested themes because they recommend them.
TikTok is a relatively young platform, but it has become increasingly popular recently. It focuses on very brief video clips (initially at most 15 seconds in length). Although they have recently increased the length of films that can be posted, short and sweet videos continue to be the mainstay of this social networking site.
The fact that anyone may contribute to the platform's content is one of TikTok's many strengths. As a result, a popular type of TikTok contest requests that entrants create a video reaction to the host's content.
You may put forth a challenge and have people record themselves trying to complete it. Even when we don't succeed at a challenge, we can still learn and have a good time trying. You can take advantage of this by holding sweepstakes instead of compensating the winners.
Learn how to use social media marketing to reach new customers, build brand awareness, and engage your existing customers. Our social media marketing tips will help you create a social media strategy that works for your business.
After you have decided which channel(s) to host your competition, you can go on to the more enjoyable portion, which is setting the specifics and guidelines for participants to follow. The following is a list of giveaway ideas for social media that might help get your creative juices flowing:
Because participants are required to spread the word to be eligible for the contest, this is one of the most prevalent types of social media competition. This, in turn, draws in other participants.
There are a lot of naturally creative people, but unless they work in an artistic profession, they might not have the opportunity to participate in artistic activities as frequently as they'd like to. Coloring contests, poetry contests, and painting contests are all fantastic options for use on social media for the same reason: participants are motivated by the prize as well as the means to obtain it.
Because so many people use their mobile devices to access social media networks, photo contests are an excellent choice. This suggests that the camera is already installed on the device they use when they first receive the contest notification, which allows for a hassle-free submission process. In addition to this, acting as a model for a day can be a lot of fun.
If you've ever read the comments section of a hot post on social media, you already know that people are outgoing and enjoy having conversations in which they can express their thoughts. Consider posing a question to the participants that they absolutely need to answer to be eligible for the giveaway. You profit from the engagement and interaction that occurs as a result of inviting people to express their thoughts by doing so since it causes them to reflect on a subject that is associated with your company and brand.
Since receiving recognition is a frequent way to motivate people, competitions in which the winner will be recognized can have a reasonable amount of success. These kinds of competitions are a fantastic concept for the following reasons:
Caption contests are among the most effective means of incorporating comedy into a competition hosted on social media. Put up a picture that has no explanation alongside it, have contestants provide a caption for the picture to be eligible, and then select the entry that makes people laugh the most as the winner.
Contests that need users to interact to win are ideal for engagement because they drive users to interact to win, and it is in the best interests of contestants to spread the word to increase their chances of winning.
The speed with which information may be disseminated is undoubtedly one of the most fascinating aspects of social media. One way to take advantage of this is to hold a contest that challenges participants to show off their knowledge. This can be accomplished by posing a trivia question, giving them a problem to solve, or asking them to write an essay.
The most successful brands on social media are the ones that work to cultivate a sense of community among their followers. This can be accomplished by giving the brand a personality and showing sympathy toward the people who follow it.
What could be a more effective strategy than avoiding making social media posts about yourself? Create a competition instead that focuses on the people living in your town and makes it about them. Inquire queries of them. Encourage kids to talk about topics that are important to them in their lives. Start some conversations.
Using a contest as an incentive to get people interested in your products is one of the most effective ways to get people's attention and get them to interact with them. You will receive free product placement and social proof if you request product images from your customers. These photos will show that actual people use and benefit from the products you sell.
Have you ever been so committed to accomplishing something because someone dared you to? This emotion is one factor that contributes to the popularity of challenge competitions. The challenge itself, as well as the prospect of coming out on top, are what drive competitors.
Now that you have been motivated by all of these suggestions, here is our challenge to you: think up a fantastic contest that is reflective of your business, select a social channel, come up with an incredible reward, and begin earning those delicious, sweet engagement numbers.
All of your advertising should work together to advance your company's goals. In addition to expanding awareness of your brand, successful digital marketing hinges on fostering meaningful relationships with your target demographic. Your social media competition needs to be well-planned and constructed. It should help your business in concrete ways while also letting you collect valuable information from your expanding customer base.
Get started right away by picking your contest's launch platforms and reading up on their respective rules and regulations. Then, have a good time coming up with social media giveaway ideas. Use the aforementioned suggestions as a jumping-off point for creating your own effective social media contest.
Are you looking for a social media marketing agency? Our experts at JanBask Digital Design can help you with all your social media needs. We can help you with strategy, planning, execution, and reporting. Contact us today to learn more about how we can help you grow your business.
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G
Great ideas.
C
Great ideas.
F
Nice ideas, I will use it.
Z
These ideas are really good.
J
Thanks, Zander!
E
I am gonna try these ideas.
W
Amazing ideas.