Social media is by far one of the best ways to activate support and awareness of your business, and there are countless ways to utilize social media to help your brand, but contests and sweepstakes tend to be one of the best. 

Social media contests do wonders in terms of driving brand engagement and word of mouth marketing/traffic to your pages, and it also will ultimately put you and your business in a good light to a large amount of your followers and potentially new social media followers.

We’re very lucky to have partnered up with a sweepstakes management specialist to help us compile this list of 5 tips to help you run a social media contest, and by going through this list of tips you’ll put you and your company’s marketing team in a much better position to make the very most out of your social media contests.

So here are the 5 tips to conducting a social media contest:

Define Your Team’s Goals and Marketing Initiatives 

The very first thing you must do when it comes to social media contests is to clearly identify why you want to conduct the contest and essentially what you’d like to come to fruition as a result of the contest. Maybe it’s more brand awareness of a new service or product, or collecting information about your followers, or really anything that you’d like to get out of a contest!

The important thing is that you must identify your goals in the initial stages of your contest management so you can then conduct everything else based upon those said goals. 

Start Getting Creative!

The actual creation of the contest is one of the most fun parts of running a social media contest, because when it comes down to it there are endless possibilities that you contest could consist of. Some ideas include video contests, any type of user-generated contests, or simple “like” and “follow” entries to help your contest or sweepstakes become worthwhile for your followers.

The more fun your contest is, and the overall intrigue of the prizes, will determine the success of more of your social media followers getting involved and ultimately spreading the word about your company and contest to their friends and family. 

Utilizing Social Channels 

One of the main advantages to conducting a social media contest are your own capabilities to market the contest via your profiles and channels on other social media platforms, as well as the platform that the contest lies within. Social media contests are innumerable, and there’s a lot to learn from past contests that have done very well.

There are also tracking tools that can assist you and your business when it comes to the overall monitoring of your contest’s success. 

Successfully Completing the Contest 

It’s important that any social media contest doesn’t go on for too long, because everyone loves to hear about a winner and want to see instant results by entering into the contest. This means that your contest should run for about 4 weeks, or maybe longer depending on the overall complexity of your entries. 

When a winner is found, you should publicize it as much as possible in order for people to see the winner’s reaction and ultimately want to participate again in your next social media contest. 

Track the Contest’s Metrics

You of course aren’t conducting social media contests just for fun, so you’ll need to monitor the results of your traffic and other marketing initiatives. Measuring engagement and click-through rates will be important when it comes to understanding what worked with your contest, and what you could improve on for next time. 

You’ll always have those initial goals in mind throughout the entirety of your contest, and when it’s all said and done you need to have concrete evidence as to how effective your contest was towards achieving your goals. 

For more information or any questions you may have, feel free to contact the experts via the link at the top of the article!