Five best practices for running a social media contest

Are you running a giveaway to promote your business? It’s easier said than done. There’s monitoring, scheduling, and even the ethics of conducting a contest.

And let’s face it, keeping your customer engaged long enough to attract new ones is seeing the light at the end of a very long tunnel.

To make sure your effort pays off, start with the basics: walk before you can run! You can create a fantastic giveaway just with a little more than an idea. With some planning and a little help from us, you’ll have all the tools to take your promotion beyond your wildest expectations. Learn how to run a giveaway that drives real engagement and results, not just empty likes and follows.

Purpose

So you want to run a giveaway? Before you start, it’s essential to have a clear purpose. Why are you running this giveaway? It’s your job to ensure that everyone who enters your contest knows its meaning.

Suppose your business needs to grow its social following and increase leads. Still, it would be best if you promoted the need to promote your business or products. In that case, that purpose needs to be more transparent and precise for the people who enter. If you tell them, they will know why they’re entering, and they might not be motivated to share or promote the giveaway with their friends.

Make sure your purpose is crystal clear by making the end prize something directly related to your business. For example, suppose you’re giving away free samples of a new product. People will be much more motivated to share if they think their friends could also use that product.

Finally, if you’re running a contest for fun or charity (but still have an ulterior motive), then make sure that supporting those causes is an essential part of why people would want to enter. That gives you some ideas on how to run a successful contest!

Prize

One must set a budget for how much one wants to spend on the giveaway. This includes the value of the prize itself and the cost of shipping it. The cost of shipping can run pretty high depending on weight and distance. A great way to lower this cost is by using an online delivery service like Ruckus Delivery which partners with other delivery services like UPS, FedEx, and DHL.

When choosing a prize, you must ensure that it’s relevant to the target audience and avoid competition hunters. For example, a hardware company should keep an iPad private because it would attract competition hunters instead of their target audience. This can be done by finding out what products your target audiences are interested in and researching whether or not they have already won similar prizes in the past.

Tool

There are many giveaway tools out there for managing your giveaways. Among the most popular are Gleam, Rafflecopter, and KingSumo Giveaways. These tools provide ways to collect your contest and generate leads from it automatically. They also include analytics to track each giveaway’s performance on social media by monitoring entry counts and shares.

A couple of crucial things to keep in mind when using these or any other giveaway tools are:

1. Make sure that the tool itself does not contain offensive material or spammy links; and
2. Only ask for email addresses after the user has been shown the content of your giveaway or offered a chance to win. If they do not have context around why they would want your email address, they will probably not feel compelled to give it to you.

Entry requirements

Contest entry requirements are much like the rules of a sport. They’re there to ensure fair play, and that will do the competition with total effort and attention. Some sports have more lenient rules than others to better appeal to the audience.

In contrast, some have stricter regulations to help out those competing. The same goes for contests: they can range from being very loose with their rules to severely limiting the amount of time, space, and content you can use to enter. Understanding how these limitations work and when they should be used is essential to running your contest effectively.

If you’re having a contest, you want it to be accessible enough so that people who want to enter it can do so easily. That’s why most competitions allow entries through multiple channels—either email or through their contest website, Facebook page, or blog comments. This is twofold: for one thing, it increases your chances of getting plenty of entries without spending money on advertising or promotion (which might not always be possible or even advisable for a small business). Secondly, it allows people who don’t typically visit your website or social media pages a chance at winning your contest by enabling them to participate in another medium they’re comfortable with.

Rules

As with most things, you run a contest on social media with specific rules in every country. In some cases, running a contest is considered gambling and will not be allowed. In other cases, you must have a permit to run a contest. There are also regulations around what can be given away and how it must be done. The bottom line is that you need to ensure the rules specific to your country of residence are being followed. You can cover examples in your own country and remind them to make sure they are aware of their own before running a contest on social media.

Win more customers

Ultimately, the best way to run a successful social media contest is to follow the above-mentioned steps. And although running a contest can take a fair amount of work, it’s also one of the best ways to build your brand and boost engagement with your followers. Keep an eye out for new trends in social media contests this year. For more blogs like this, don’t forget to visit us!