A social media contest can increase excitement around your brand and offer an exciting opportunity for the participants to win something! Additionally, you are growing word-of-mouth advertising by inviting engagement and interaction on your page. So, is running a contest on social media right for your business? Yes, it most likely is!
The most critical step to launching a social contest is outlining your end goal. With every business and marketing decision you make, it’s important to be able to evaluate its success. To assess a contest’s success when it is over, you need to have a specific and measurable goal already defined. Common goals could include increased engagement, followers, leads, or brand awareness.
Keep Your Social Media Contest On-Brand
For a social media contest to be successful, it has to excite participants and logically connect to your brand.
Tie your contest in with your brand by both the type of contest you choose to run and the prize you offer. For example, you work at a car dealership and want to run a social media contest. Your goal might be to increase follower engagement. Try running a contest asking followers to comment with their top must-haves when purchasing a new vehicle. Using a simple question like this that talks about your product is a win-win gaining you more engagement and pushing your followers to think about making a purchase.
Now the prize! Your prize should align with your brand and business, in this case, cars. Brainstorm different on-brand prizes that interest your audience in entering. If we are asking about a must-have in a car, maybe your prize is a gift card for accessories sold in your dealership.
Tips for Running a Successful Social Media Contest
Now that you’ve laid the groundwork for your contest by deciding your goal and prize, it’s time to implement it! Here are some tips on how to create a successful social contest campaign.
Share Share Share!
Write your contest post with all the information necessary for followers to participate. Then share and keep your contest top of mind! You can do this by:
- Pin your post to the top of your Facebook page so any new followers coming to your page can easily enter.
- Share your post to your Facebook stories or on other social platforms.
- Write another post remaining followers to enter before the contest ends!
Continue the Conversation
Your followers are engaging with your page, engage with them back! If you’re asking followers to comment on their favorite product from your business, comment back on their entry about why you think that is an awesome product too. Or something as simple as liking each entry or saying thank you to your followers for entering is a great way to continue that engagement.
Stay Timely
Be sure to keep it timely and easy for participants to enter. If you have them “like this,” “comment this,” and then “submit this,” they will talk themselves out of putting in the effort for the prize. A good timeline to follow is 10-15 days for a contest entry period. If you do it longer, it could get lost in the algorithms, and people will forget about it. Causing a headache trying to get ahold of the prize winner.
Don’t Over Do It!
As much as you want to continuously increase your engagement and following, running a contest every other week can decrease the excitement and success of your posts. The hype won’t be there if people constantly see a contest running. As a result, most people will lose interest, and you won’t see an increase in your end goal.
Ready to launch your first Facebook contest? We’d love to help you create your goal, think through the fine details, and implement your contest for success!