If you are looking to get more from your social media, you may be looking into running a social media contest. These are a lot of run and can do what you want your social media campaigns to do, namely engage with your customers and clients. Getting the most from digitally driven contests can take some work and effort.
- Go over the terms of the social media contracts. Before you even get started with your digital driven contest, you need to really understand what you can and cannot do with your social media accounts. There are rules that are set up by all of the different social media platforms so just because one contest idea worked great on Instagram, there may be other rules for a Facebook campaign. Go over the terms of service before you do any other work on your campaign.
- Decide what you want to accomplish. Before you start your digitally driven contests, you should know what it is you want to accomplish with your contest. Are you looking to increase awareness of your brand? Do you want to get more user data insights? Are you looking to gain more followers? If you are not able to articulate what you want to get out of the contests you are running, you will have a really hard time succeeding with your contest or campaign.
- Really think about what kind of contest will get you what you want. If you are looking to run social fantasy games that is one thing. Some examples of popular and helpful social media contests include trivia, photo caption contests and sweepstakes. What you want to accomplish with your contest will help you determine which kind of social media contest will be best for your campaign.
- Time your contest correctly. Timing mat not be everything but it can have a very big impact on how successful your social media contest is. Part of this is the length of the contest. If you make the end date too far off, people will not be inclined to join in. Give your contests have a sense of urgency and make people want to sign up right away.
- Make sure your rules make sense. You need to come up with clear and understandable rules for participation in your social media contest. If you want your digitally driven contests to succeed, people need to understand what they need to do to sign up and take part. When you are writing your rules up, make sure you have someone who is not involved with running the contest go through it and make sure it is easy to understand.
- Make sure people know who can take part. If you are running a promotion, you need to be clear about who can and cannot enter and win. Some of this may not be in your hands. If there are laws in your area, you have to comply with them. Once you know who can and cannot take part, you have to post that in a manner that is just as clear as your rules. If a number of people sign up and later learn that they cannot win, you can do more damage to your brand than anything. Be careful when it comes to the eligibility for your contest.
- Think about the people who will participate via mobile devices. More and more people access the internet on their mobile devices. If you neglect to make your contest work well on mobile devices, you will lose a large number of people. Even when people do access the internet on a computer, they often do their social media on a device. You will end up hurting yourself in the long run if you do not pay attention to how your contest looks on a phone or on a tablet.
Social media contests and other digitally driven contests can be great for a number of reasons. You can grow the awareness of your brand, increase your numbers of followers and friends and get a lot of information about your current and prospective clients and customers.
