A Guideline to Creating Social Media Contest
Why Use Social Media Contest
Nowadays social media has become not only a key part of the modern lifestyle, but also a useful tool for business to achieve their marketing objectives. Therefore, social media contests are an effective way to promote your business, grow followers, increase customer engagement, as well as to build brand awareness.
Guideline to Social Media Contest
Although most platforms provide step by step instruction for social media contest, planning is essential for a successful and effective social media contest.
Step 1: Contest objectives
A clearly defined objective lays the foundation of the proposed contest.
Step 2: Determine type of platforms
- Facebook: a site that has the highest online user base and probably yields the highest participation rate. It suits for all types of contests.
- Twitter: a site that suits for all type of contests. Creating a specific hashtag is important.
- Pinterest: a site that particularly focuses on visual presentation. It is thus recommended for photo-based contests.
However, a business should not be restricted from running social media contest on a single platform. As multiple platforms can be used to run the same contest to reach maximum potential users.
Step 3: Determine type of contest
- Sweepstakes:the easiest contest form. Generally, participants only need to submit name and email to possibly win a prize.
- Caption:participants to describe a given photo. The participant who gives the best description wins.
- Vote:requires participants to vote by clicking their preference option. It is a great way to listen to your users or consumers and gain respective insight from them.
- User-generated content:requires users to create relevant content for a particular topic. The user-generated contents are generally in the form of essay, photo, or video. This is a great way to increase engagement.
Step 4: Choose prize
- Determine a prize that will be particularly attractive to the ideal users for your brand.
Step 5: Decide contest rules
- Clearly state the rules for your social media contest. Easily-understood and detailed rules allow participants to better understand the contest.
Step 6: Promote and share contest
- Promote your contest on social media, especially to those who are ideal for your brand. Share the contest link via social media, email, blog, and word-of-mouth. Make sure the contest is mobile-friendly.
Step 7: Notify the winner
- Finally, contact the winner, give the prize, and write a thank-you email or post to all the participants.
In addition, other factors such as contest landing page, contest image design and format are also important.
Social Media Contest Trial on Facebook
For beginners, you can start your trial contest on Facebook with the following steps:
- Go to Facebook Contest
- Write a title for your contest
- Select contest language from drop-down menu
- Write a short introduction for your contest and possible prize
- In addition, you are also given the chance to write for ending text and thank-you text
- Click “Advanced options” to configure:
- If users can participate only one time or once per day
- Whether to be notified of any user’s participation in the contest
- If public are allowed to view the results
- The period of time to run the contest
- Create questions and personal info for participating users to enter
- Questions such as name and email address are essential, as it allows you to know who are participating and the person who wins the prize.
- Click “next – share” and, your contest is ready to run!
Conclusion
In conclusion, social media contests are a great tool for digital marketers. Knowledge in using social media contests allows business to yield more benefits. While there are already numerous successful marketing cases for social media contest, what are you waiting for?
By: Xufang Qin