How To Boost Your Following With Social Media Competitions
Running competitions or giveaways on social media is a great way to increase traffic on your socials, start an online conversation and increase brand awareness.
After all, who doesn’t like getting free goodies?
determine the goal of your giveaway or competition.
You can’t exactly run a giveaway without knowing what your goal is, here are a few objectives we use when running giveaways.
Grow follower count: use a giveaway to grow your followers by increasing traffic to your page.
Increase engagement and start a conversation: Usually, brands end up asking people to like, comment, tag on the competition post to increase chances of winning.
Increase brand awareness: Maybe your goal is to get your brand out there? You can do this by asking people to tag several of their friends in the comment section of the post.
Promote new products: Giveaways or competitions are a great way to get a new product into the spotlight which can generate leads and boost sales.
Once you pinpoint what your objective is you’re on your way to a successful competition post!
What are you giving away?
Sounds simple enough right? Is it a new product from your skincare line? a t-shirt perhaps? maybe some delicious goodies? Whatever it may be, it needs to look awesome. Spend some time figuring out how you can make your product look the best. Shoot high-quality photos, maybe a GIF of your product flat lay? Just make sure the image is tempting.
Know the rules
Each social media platform has specific sets of rules when it comes to running promotions, violate them and you could end up in trouble with the social media police (it’s kind of serious). Facebook’s rules for example state that ‘Promotions may be administered on Pages, groups, events or within apps on Facebook. Personal timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions’. Instagram’s rules state that you must ‘Not inaccurately tag content or encourage users to inaccurately tag content’. Make sure you read up on the rules on each platform before conducting your promotion.
How to actually run your giveaway or competition
Choose what platform you want to run your giveaway on, there is no ‘better’ platform, personally I think using multiple platforms for your giveaway or comp is an advantage.
Instagram is a great way to really showcase your product/s, think of it as window shopping.
Facebook continues to dominate as the most popular social media platform, perfect for running ads and hosting your business page.
Twitter is a friendly platform when it comes to tagging friends and following notifications and hashtags.
Here are some giveaway/competition running criteria that can be used across platforms:
Tag friends: @friends this is a solid way to increase traffic to your post and page by asking people to tag a few of their friends to be eligible to win.
Follow: Make it so that people have to follow your account in order to qualify for the competition. Woohoo followers!
Comments: Get people to tell you why they should win, make it fun and the person with the best comment wins!
Repost the giveaway image: Have people repost your giveaway post on Instagram, but make sure to also ask them to use your specific giveaway #hashtag as well or to tag you in the image – otherwise it will be next to impossible to keep track of.
Having several criteria (example – tag 3 friends AND must be following) opens up this giveaway to current followers, whereas a “follow to enter” doesn’t necessarily give you any kind of extra advantage of getting in front of new eyes and audiences.
Pick the winner
The method of picking the winner is up to you! You can literally pick a name out of a hat, find the most entertaining comment, or use a random selection tool. Just make sure who you pick has followed all the rules. e.g is following you, has reposted the image and is a legit account, if they have no followers and the only posts they have are your giveaway ones, usually it’s a spam account who have entered multiple accounts to win. Move on and pick someone who plays fair.
Announcing the winner
Once you have picked the winner announce the winner via another post or on your stories! This keeps the excitement going as people want to know who won and curbs the skeptics wondering if there was actually ever going to be a winner, it also gives the winner a shoutout and makes them feel great!
Thank your audience for participating
Thank everyone who entered your competition or giveaway it will make them feel appreciated and more inclined to continue to enter in your next one!
Need a hand running your social media competition? We can help! Contact us at MBP today and take your business to new heights.