12 Sep 4 Excellent Ways to Make Your Brand Pop on Social Media with Contests
When thinking of ways to promote your brand on social media, one of the first ideas many social marketers have is to hold a contest. This is a great way to boost user engagement, rack up return visits, and get people invested in your brand. Even if your brand hasn’t hit the ground running quite yet, hosting social media contests is a great way to increase brand recognition, as well as gain more engagement along the way.
In general, you would be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t enjoy winning something for free. However, there are some individuals who believe social media contests can be an invasion of privacy and prefer to avoid them altogether. While these contests do collect contact information, such as emails, there are always certain rules and restrictions that the contest holder must abide by.
Unfortunately, the popularity of contests has also caused social media companies like Facebook to place some restrictions on how they are conducted. Previously, it was common to use the contest as a way to gain Facebook Likes by making the entry process include liking the brand’s page on Facebook, which made contests an excellent way of gaining subscribers.
As a result, Facebook has banned the technique, arguing that it unfairly creates incentives for people to “like” things they do not, diluting the meaning of the Facebook Like. Other social media brands are expected to follow suit in the future as well. Despite this, there are still ways that contests can build engagement for smaller brands with less-than-desirable followings. Read on to find out how:
1) Spread across multiple channels
Fortunately, there are still plenty of ways to use Facebook as a platform to host contests and giveaways. But why stop at just one platform? How about a social-media-wide contest spread across Instagram, Google Plus, Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook. By covering all the major social networks, you can increase user engagement across all channels in order to ensure you’re reaching the widest audience.
With the decreasing efficacy of organic reach, this approach is more relevant than ever, especially for smaller brands less able to make up the difference with ad spending.
Unfortunately, adding so many other moving parts can multiply difficulties and complications. Luckily, for the social marketer, services like HootSuite exist to simplify coordination across channels, allowing you to replicate posts, sort followers, and simplify correspondence throughout your social media efforts. With the added coordination abilities of HootSuite, you can stretch your organic reach as far as it will go.
2) Create a promotional calendar
A promotional calendar can make the difference in the administrative portions of a contest, in fact, it’s unwise to embark upon the task without a concrete timeline. Decide when you intend to announce winners, and work backwards from there. As we covered before, nothing can deflate a contest like small numbers of entries, so be sure that you give enough time for everyone to join.
Even before you open the contest to entries, it’s not too early to start building up hype. Introduce your fans to the idea, across all channels, in the days before the contest. Make sure that every piece of communication is self-contained, because you can’t count on every person seeing every message you send.
3) Be interactive
If your contest requires users to post a photo or other piece of content to your Facebook page, interact with it! Depending on how many entries you receive, choose a time interval and select an exceptionally good entry to reshare, promote, and build suspense for your contest. When you share someone’s entry, it’s like a mini-win in and of itself, rewarding the fan even if they don’t ultimately win the prize. Best of all, it’s free for you to do!
Even if the terms of your contest doesn’t give you user content to share, you can still promote by answering users’ questions, retweeting good comments, and generally being affable and friendly. You have their attention! Use it!
4) Consider paying to temporarily increase your organic reach
As we have mentioned before, the contestants are the most important part of planning your contest. After all, without them, you don’t have a contest! There are a lot of ways to do this, but one sure way to do this is to invest some money into it. Facebook has an official contest app to help with this.
There are also plenty of unofficial apps which might be more affordable for smaller brands than the official Facebook app.
However, let’s be clear as to what you shouldn’t invest in as well. Many businesses are still under the impression that having a large number of followers and fans is what indicates success. Wrong! While you might be tempted to “buy” fans from sites that offer services like this, it’s definitely not the way to earn a relevant following. Think about where those fans would be coming from; you probably won’t be able to expect them to invest in your products or services.
The real winner: your brand
With the decline of organic reach and the subsequent difficulties associated with it, brands have been scrambling to recover their former numbers and engagement. Though some have just ponied up the advertising bucks to make up the difference, it’s not always an option for smaller brands. A contest can be a great, inexpensive way to breathe new life into your brand’s social media presence.
Dave Landry Jr. is an online business journalist, finance counselor, and entrepreneur. When he’s not sharing his research on social media marketing trends, he enjoys covering the importance of business communications, the process of globalization, and developing technology in the VoIP industry.
