How to Grow Your Brand with Social Media Contests

Running social media contests has become a new way to grow your brand online. By posting engaging content, brands can easily convert followers into qualified leads and sales. Social Media contests forms an essential part in building your marketing efforts in order to reach new audiences. Fact – Around 33% contest participants are open to receiving information about the brand and partners. 

Here are few benefits of running an engaging social media contest online, that can actually helps your brand grow online:

• Increase in Followers:

When you are running a Contest, you can increase your followers by asking the participants to follow you on social media. Social Media contests helps you to boost your followers counts in a short period of time without spending a fortune. The screenshot of a post mentioned below is a perfect example of  how one can increase the number of followers by running contests, only by encouraging the participants to follow and comment on your post.

(Source: Swati Verma)

• Generate Brand Awareness:

While you plan to run a contest on social media, you can collaborate with a brand to introduce yourself to the brand’s audience. This way people can visit your profile and more people are likely to see it and learn about your brand. Here’s an example of how one can implement this strategy.

(Source: Corallista Blog)

• Increase in Sales:

One of the important reasons for posting a social media contest is that it increases sales by hosting a giveaway that gives back to you. Ask your followers to make a purchase to enter the social media contest. It drives more traffic and sales to your website as well as outlines your presence, along with enticing contestants. On average over 34% new customers are acquired through contests. What are you waiting for?

(Source: Blissful Organix Makeup)

The next question is “How to run a Social Media Contest?” How do we set our goals and objectives? 

To run a social media contest, you need an effective strategy that can generate leads and engagement. Follow these steps each time to get started with a new contest or giveaway to make it a huge success.

• Set your goals:

There are a number of reasons to host a contest or giveaway. First of all, it is important to figure out the goal you want to achieve from launching a contest, whether you want to increase the number of followers, increase brand awareness or generate more sales. Once you have identified the purpose of your contest, it will be easier for you to create a solid strategy for your contest.

• Determine your contest type:

After determining the goal of your contest, start thinking about what outcome you are looking for. If you want to increase your followers, request your audience to follow your social media page. This is most popular on Instagram and Instagram accounts that hold contests grow their followers 70% faster on average than accounts that don’t.

• Set your budget and prizes:

The prize you give out totally depends on the goal of the contest, your target audience, and your budget, but whatever it is, you should choose a giveaway that your target audience will love and motivate them to connect with your brand. If you are planning to host contests or giveaways more often, make sure you plan out the budget well in advance. And once you know how much you are willing to spend, you can split the amount into promoting the contest and the prize for the same. Contests with prizes of $1000 or more receive an engagement rate of 5.8% per 100 followers.

• Know your audiences:

First you will have to understand who all are your target audience and how much time they are spending on each social media platform. Once you know this, you will be able to understand which platform is suitable for you to run the contest. Knowing and understanding your audience can help you in determining what kind of contests your audience will participate in.

• Run your contest:

When you are done with identifying your audience and setting your budget, announce your contest on your chosen social media platform, run ads and promote your contest on other social media platforms as well. Active promotions get 15 – 1769 clicks, with 266 on average.

• Measure your results

Once your contest is over and the winner is announced and after sending the prize to the winner, it’s time for you to check the results. You should measure the results based on what your objectives were from the beginning.

Hosting a social contest is a great way to bring awareness to your business. Pick a social contest tool to create and run your contest based on your needs and end goal. Few tools that you can use to run your contests are:

• Rafflecopter –  Rafflecopter is among the simplest and easiest social contest tools to use if you’re a solopreneur or new to doing giveaways.
• ShortStack – Shortstack is a good option if you’re going to run giveaways and other contest types regularly, you’ll need a robust and fully-featured tool.
• Wishpond – If you’re looking for a tool that also includes email marketing functionality, Wishpond is perfect.
• AgoraPulse – If Facebook is your main marketing platform for your business, Agorapulse is a great option, especially because it is also one of the best social media management tools on the market as well.
• Gleam – If you’re looking for more entry options to help grow your business, consider using Gleam.
• Vyper – If you want a complete referral marketing platform that offers giveaways, contests, leaderboards, ambassador programs, loyalty campaigns, and more – check out Vyper.
• Woobox –  Woobox is great if your marketing strategy uses Facebook contests. But, Woobox is also perfect for other popular social platforms including Vine, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Social media contests are all about building community and awareness, increasing engagement, reach, followers and potential customers, and you want to make sure that you’re constantly checking in on your reports and testing new contest types and platforms.

Social Media Contest is an amazing way to build a strong, loyal and engaging followers for long term basis as it can generate leads and turn them into sales. Brands are now taking advantage of social media contests to target and engage the next generation and millennials. Apart from user engagement, social media contests will help you in increasing awareness to potential customers. Ensure that you are giving one of a kind experience to catch your followers’ attention. This way you will be a step ahead of your competitors.