Social Media Contests – Think About It!

Running your first social media contest? Should you even be running a social media contest? What are your goals of the contest? These are all questions and concerns you should be having before running your first social media contest.

After running a few social media contests and reading other social media experts thoughts and experiences with their contests, I have compiled some thoughts on what I think is most important to consider when running your contest:

1) Why are you running the contest in the first place?

• Do you want to increase the amount of “Likes” on your Facebook page
• Increase the number of followers to your twitter account
• Launch a new product or brand
• Add emails to your email list

Choose what type of contest to run:

2)      Figure out the best type of contest to engage your audience, but also to achieve your  overall goalThe easier the contest (sweepstakes, “Like” a Facebook page, Retweet a tweet), the more people will enter, but the less engagement the consumer will have with your brand

• On the reverse side, the more engagement it takes to enter a contest (submitting photos or videos, scavenger hunts) the less people will actually join the contest, but the contestants that do join will engage more with your brand
• The most important aspect of the contest is that it is easy to enter and easy for people to share

3)      Don’t just use Social Media medium to promote the contest:

• Have links to the contest on your website
• Use paid Facebook ads to help drive to the contest page
• Promote the contest through your email list
• Leverage partners to plug your contest
• Submit your contest to social media contest sites

Your first medium that you choose to promote the contest through might not work out to be the best, so always have a contingency plan in place if not seeing desired results

4)      Set up a rules page

• Short and sweet, have a place for contestants to check out all of the legalities of the contest
• You don’t want them to argue or post anything negative in the social space
• Make sure to read Facebook’s promotional guidelines before creating a contest on their site

Hopefully, I answered a few of your questions or concerns or even gave you a new idea on what to consider when running your first social media contest!