Running a Social media Contest can be a great way to grow your existing fan base, promote brand awareness and help achieve your business goals on social. When preparing to run a contest on your social channels, there are several things that should be considered first and foremost. You do not want to spend the time, money and resources to create an unsuccessful promotion due to lack of planning. Keep these six things in mind when building out your social contest framework.

Choose your platform

When creating a social contest, decide which platform you want to utilize. While you can share contest announcements across your other social channels to help drum up additional reach, the entry form or submission page should exist in one place. Facebook is a good option as your contest hub as you can iframe in a landing page for your contest as a page tab.

Decide a contest format

Once you have selected the channel for your contest, choose the type of contest you would like to run. It should relate back to the primary goal of the contest. Goals can vary from collecting user-generated content to use on your channel, to email collections or new user acquisitions. The contest type can be simplified to one of the following: sweepstakes, photo contest, video contest, essay contest, voting contest or instant wins.

Pick relevant prizing

While offering a prize like a dream vacation or new tech products are desirable, they may have nothing to do with your brand. Your prize should both appeal to your audience and be relevant to your brand. It should resonate with your target audience’s interests to help be a driver for entries.

Promote with targeted ad spend

Applying spend to promote the contest is a must with the pay-to-play architecture of social networks today. Doing so will amplify your contest’s reach and push content beyond your existing fans. It’s vital that you build out your ad targeting prior to launch so that you know exactly what users you want to focus on. Furthermore, examining the potential reach based on various levels of ad spend can give you a realistic understanding of how far your ad spend can carry you.

Make it shareable

As you finalize your contest format, consider ways to increase its sharability. Give users a reason to share the contest with friends to increase your overall reach, gain additional entries and extend user awareness. Offering bonus entries for sharing or making sharing a part of the entry form provide an easy opportunity to increase its success and rewards users.

Ease the entry process

When building out your contest, make sure your entry page loads quickly and has been tested across browsers. Having the form responsive for mobile is also a good way to increase entries and be more user-friendly. Finally, keeping the submission process simple can reduce user error and generate a higher conversion rate.

Social contests are a great way to help propel your brand’s social growth. Running a contest can amplify the effectiveness of your advertising by increasing social consumption and getting your brand name in front of more people. It not only keeps existing users engaged with the brand by rewarding them for following the page but can create an easy win for your brand by fueling social exposure, all in a short period of time.

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