Running a social media competition is a great way to engage and excite your existing audience and help promote your brand to a new audience. While it might seem like a simple task on the surface, there is plenty to consider, making sure you have a clear goal and are keeping it within the law! But don’t worry, I’m here to focus on ways to run a successful Facebook, Twitter or Instagram competition that engages the right people with a social media strategy.
- Keep it simple
The entry method needs to be straightforward and easy for social media users to complete. If there’s too many hoops to jump through, they will simply scroll on by. Define the goal before you get going – do you want to engage your existing audience or reach a new audience? Do you want to celebrate a new product or create brand awareness? Do you want to grow a particular social channel?
- The right prize
A competition is a chance to celebrate a new product or remind your following of a pre-existing product that you feel deserves a boost. It’s also a great idea to team up with other brands that share a similar audience, but produce a different product to your own, so you can benefit from cross-promoting across yours and their channels.
- Make it legal
This is a vital step. Making sure you follow the community guidelines of the platform you are promoting the competition across is really important. For example, for each platform be wary of the below:
- Facebook – do not ask entrants to share the competition, write their own status about the competition or tag friends in the post.
- Twitter – do not tell users to create multiple accounts or share the same tweet repeatedly to enter.
- Instagram – only ask followers to tag friends in the comments, do not ask them to tag people directly in the photo.
Be sure to check out a full list of the official rules of the platform you are promoting your competition through.
- Shout about it!
If you run a competition on Facebook, it’s great to start your post with something eye-catching, such as ‘IT’S COMPETITION TIME!’ to grab attention – and then the details about the competition can follow. If it’s a seriously exciting prize, ran over a fairly long period, creating new cover images, profile images, tailoring your e-newsletter, adding a banner to your website or creating a blog about the prizes, can add awareness of the competition.
- Think outside the box
Using a social promotion application, such as Woobox, allows you to run competitions across multiple platforms at the same time, helping you reach as many of the right people as possible. Whether a photo contest, video contest, UGC contest or sweepstake, Woobox helps you to create a customisable campaign hosted on your website or by collecting hashtag submissions.
To find out more about how we can help you create a compelling social-media competition or create a social media strategy get in touch.
