How To Run A Successful Social Media Competition. Revealed By The Professional
How To Run A Successful Social Media Competition. Revealed By The Professional
Purple Fruits expert Social Media Guru, Nicole Limberios, provides us with her social media competition expertise to explain exactly what you should consider when creating your own competition online.
Discover the aim of your social media competition
Social media competitions are absolutely key to creating a successful branded social media strategy. You will probably have seen for yourself all the different competitions being run by business all over the world. Although these are great for the short term spouts of user engagement, many businesses fail to consider the long term effects and benefits they could gain from running the competitions.
Although the extra likes, comments, tweets and shares look amazing on your monthly social media reports, you’re not actually benefiting from anything in the long term after your short spout of engagement.
These are some of the long term benefits all businesses should consider before starting their social competitions. Get users to support future engagement by:
- Providing an answer to questions
- Adding photos and videos
- Filling in a form that captures data such as email
- Opting-in to receiving latest business updates
Content Curation
Social competitions are great for content curation. During your competition, you should ask people to provide a photo or video that you can use further on in your marketing. For example, if you are a hair extension company, and you have tons of photos of your brand fans wearing your extensions, use them in your blog posts and your social platforms. This is a great way of developing credibility and getting people to see your products in a humanised and realistic way, rather than on an anonymous model on your website.
Develop Brand Advocates
The easiest way to create brand advocates that will benefit your business long term is to use the winner from your competition who has gained your free product or service and turn them into your brand advocate.
Simply feature their information on your website with them wearing or using your product and service. By doing this, you will give your brand advocate a sense of importance, almost like they are a mini-celebrity for your brand. This will keep them coming back to your brand as they will feel moved by the sense of loyalty and trust. Then they will do a great bunch of marketing for you in return!
Choose The Relevant Social Channel Wisely
Before you even think about starting your social competition, the first thing you must consider is your audience and where they are most likely to hangout. For example, if you have over 500 Facebook likes and only 100 Twitter followers, then it is obvious that you should be running a Facebook competition.
Rules Are Boring But Need To Be Shown
Another thing you need to think about is somewhere you need to display in detail the rules of the competition. The easiest way to do this is by either creating a Facebook note which you can send a link out to, or to create a hidden blog post on your website that is exclusive for competition entrees only.
Social Channel Tips
You should design your entry mechanism to suit your chosen social platform of where you will be running your competition. If you have chosen Facebook, you can ask people to like or comment on a status or share a photo or status onto their page with your tag. For Twitter, you could create a tweet asking people to answer by using a particular hashtag along with their image or video. If you’re using Instagram, you could get entrees to re-gram your photos and then tag you in it along with a chosen hashtag. And lastly, if you are using Pintrest, they could pin an image with your mention in the comments followed by a hashtag.
Dont forget, although these tips keep your competition simple, they will not provide you with benefits that will further market your business after initial engagement. You need to use it as content curation as explained above by asking people to share your photos of your brand and product/service.
Keep It Simple
The harder you make it for people to enter and complete the competition, the more likely they are to drop out and give up. You need to keep your competition as simple as possible by making them take one or two actions at the most. The easier the competition, the higher number of entrees you will receive.
If you would like Purple Fruit to originate and/or run your social competition for you, get in touch for your bespoke pricing today!
