Social media competitions, when done well, can help your business achieve any number of marketing goals. Whether you want to increase your number of fans or followers, promote customer engagement, collect useful information or just thank your customers for their continued loyalty, a well-planned and professionally executed social media competition can be just the thing you need.
However, running a social media competition is not always a simple, straightforward process – especially if you have never run one before. Without proper planning, your competition runs the risk of falling flat on its face and failing to achieve your goals.
If you’re planning on running a social media competition and want it to be a success, try following these top tips.
Decide what you want to achieve
This may seem like an obvious first step, but many businesses will miss this out, instead just deciding they want to run a competition for the sake of it. Deciding what goal you want to achieve will help shape the rest of the process.
Decide what format your competition will have
Once you’ve decided your aim, the next step is to decide what format your competition is going to take. Do you want people to simply follow you, or perhaps to share an image or post, or maybe you want them to answer a question or submit something? Also, what prize are you going to give away? If you want to only target potential customers, choosing a prize that is relevant to your brand is a good way to achieve this.
Decide what platform you will use and how long your competition will run for
Different types of competitions will be more suitable for different social media platforms, which is another reason why you must decide what you want to achieve and what format your competition will take before anything else. Once you have decided what platform you are going to use, you then need to choose how long you will run your competition for.
Promote your competition
Very few people are going to enter your competition if it is not properly promoted. As soon as you launch your competition, kick off a strong promotion campaign to run alongside it. This could include sponsored tweets, Facebook adverts, or maybe a banner on your website. It is also a good idea to choose a hashtag to go along with your competition to make it memorable, as well as making it easy to track.
Make sure you have clear terms and conditions
This is a vital component of any social media competition. Make sure you have clear, easy to follow terms and conditions, to keep you out of any potential trouble. Consider putting these on their own landing page, which you can then link to from your tweets or Facebook posts.
If you follow all of these steps, you should have a successful social media competition up and running in no time!
