Winning with social media competitions
Coming into the silly season and year end, you’re bound to see a few competitions being posted in Facebook and Instagram from profiles you’re following. A lot of social media competitions aim to produce user generated content (UGC) through sharing a photo or a video, writing a caption and commenting to win. Other tactics include referring a friend by tagging or sharing pages.
Social media competitions are a great low-cost option for increasing your organic reach and should be built into your communication plan for your yearly content calendar. These types of competitions can help you to re-engage with your audience during lull periods, extend reach during heavy sales periods and to reward customer loyalty.
Key principles of running social media competitions
1. Be SMART in your objective. That is, be Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time bound.
2. Ensure that your objective and the type of competition that you want to run is appropriate for your chosen social media channel. For example, Instagram would not be a good fit with a “submit an essay” type of competition, but ideal for anything visual such as posting a photo.
3. Check and follow the social media channel guidelines for running competitions and put together clear terms and conditions on how to enter. Keep it simple with the objective you want to achieve and note that some types of competitions require written permission or even permits from associated states/territories.
4. Allow people to mention your business – check that your social account settings allow people to do this.
5. Use a unique hashtag. Be consistent with the hashtag you use or create one of your own to track your submissions. Note that using a long-winded hashtag might be easy to misspell for competition entrants.
6. Monitor the results of your competition by looking at your reach (the number of people who saw your post), your engagement (the reactions to your competition including comments, likes, clicks and shares) and the content that’s being generated. This can be reused for future marketing activities.
7. Use a randomiser platform to pick winner from comments and likes if your competition is to be randomly decided.
If you want to be a winner with social media competitions but you’re unsure on how to get started, please make a comment below or get in touch through our let’s talk page.
