In this day and age, it seems every business is battling for real estate on your timeline.
This year we’ve gone through several Facebook updates meant to increase the quality of both organic content and ads. Running a social media contest to increase your brand’s awareness and engagement is not as easy as it used to be, but when done right, it’s a fantastic way to engage with the community.
Every contest takes a calculated approach to creative and strategic execution. No sweat! Let’s look at 5 important factors for creating a successful contest.
Set your business objectives and budget
The first question you’ll want to answer is what action would you like to see result from this contest. Are you looking for more community engagement? Or would you like to get more newsletter sign ups? Once you determine your business objectives, you’ll want to set goals and metrics that you can track. Setting a budget will hopefully help attract new customers and new conversations on your contest post. Remember, Facebook sees quality content as highly-engaged ads or organic posts. It makes sense to set aside a good chunk of your budget to spread awareness and gather engagement.
Provide an X Factor
X factor is a buzzword at THM. You may know it as the wow factor or jazz hands depending on your background. The X Factor of your contest is how you position your prize. This doesn’t mean it needs to be a vacation, a new car, or a thousand dollars — it just needs to be worth it to enter and share with friends or family. Your X Factor could be a month or two of weekly giveaways or a full week of giveaways. You could also announce winners on a live feed or host an event that people must be present at to win. Each of these X factors poses challenges to pull off, but with the right planning, the daunting tasks can be broken into small, easy chunks.
Plan for Everything and Scrutinize your Contest Parameters
As you begin planning for your contest, you’ll want to set up rules and specify how to enter. These need to be as simplified as possible which can be extremely tough. You’ll want to keep instructions and rules to 2 – 4 sentences. The last thing you’re trying to do is confuse your audience. It’s helpful to have people you can bounce ideas off of and get feedback from on rules and instructions. Ask them to read the post and then walk you through how they would enter this contest. If there’s any hesitation or hiccups, then you know the rules probably need a tune-up. Setting clear contest parameters will help you qualify participants. If too many parameters get lost, then you wind up with incomplete entries.
Ready to see what a contest can do for you?
If you want to see what a contest could do for your social accounts but don’t have time to do it right, send us a message. We’d love to learn your business objectives and show you how we can set goals and metrics to create a successful social media contest.
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