Your company’s goal should be to generate excitement. You may expand your customer base and attract new clients through social media.

In addition, social media contests for local businesses increase demand by arousing interest in the company’s products and services, leading to more people talking about and sharing information about the firm.

How to Begin.

How effective are giveaways on social media?

Yes. If you want more interaction and clicks from your social media followers, then you can’t go wrong with a giveaway.

Somewhere around 34% of all new consumers are found through contests and freebies on social media, and roughly 65% of poll respondents think they are effective for gaining followers.

Contests on Instagram increase accounts by an average around 70% faster than other Instagram accounts, and a recent study by EasyPromos found that Facebook giveaways produce 1,000% more interactions than other Facebook posts.

The success of social media contests and how they work

Social media contests are great for getting people to talk to one another. The contestants may also be presented with a unique and thrilling opportunity. A prize in the range of $300 to $400 may not seem like much to a business, but to the winner it can be a life-changing windfall.

More than 62% of people who enter a social media contest will also share the contents of the contest with a friend in an effort to get that friend to participate in the competition as well. Word-of-mouth advertising, which is responsible for about 13% of all sales, is a common practise in the marketing sector. This is due to the fact that consumers are 90% more likely to make a purchase from a company after hearing positive feedback about it from a friend.

Lead generation, brand awareness, and audience participation are all possible outcomes of running a contest. You may rest assured that these advantages won’t disappear the moment your competition ends.

About a third of contest entrants say they wouldn’t mind hearing more from the brand that hosted the giveaway. Therefore, you can use social media giveaways to increase the size of your email list.
Aspects of a Successful Online Competition
If you want to run a successful social media contest, you need to find a way to get people excited about entering, make a meaningful connection to your business, and adhere to the platform’s guidelines all at once.

Take these steps to ensure the success of your social media contest:

Adhere to the norms

Before launching a contest on any social media platform, it is imperative that you familiarise yourself with the platform’s guidelines on how to operate such events.

For instance, Facebook has lately set strict guidelines for hosting competitions on the site. Instagram, Pinterest, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok, among others, have their own guidelines for hosting competitions.

Incorporate the brand identity consistently.

Incorporate your brand’s identity into the contest as much as feasible. This comprises the nature of the competition and the incentive offered to participants.

It would be unusual, for instance, for a vehicle dealership to hold a contest offering free headphones or free jewellery. On the other hand, it makes sense for a dealership to hold a contest where the grand prize is a brand new automobile, or to urge people to take an test drive and post about it.

Keep in mind that spreading the word about your brand is a key objective when hosting a social media contest. You can increase the marketing value of the contest by include as much information as possible about the brand in its promotion.

Add some spice.

Create interest in your contest by making it as appealing as possible.

You can excite your target audience by utilising an attention-grabbing graphic, posing a challenge that must be shared, offering you increase the reward as the number of entrants grows, or providing a truly exceptional or significant award.

Conducting a Successful Online Contest

Don’t worry. If you want to run a successful contest that gets people excited and brings in new contacts, you need follow these four steps:

In other words, you should aim towards something.
Figure out the rules of the competition.
Fix the location of the launch
Publicize it

Step 1: Prepare objectives for your social media competition.

As a first step in organising a social media competition, you should formulate Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Realistic, and Timely (SMART) objectives and choose the metrics to be monitored as the competition progresses.

Planning your social media challenge with a clear endpoint in mind will help you gauge its performance after it’s over. If you start with the data, you may boost your marketing efforts and create more successful contests in the future.

Here are a few examples of possible targets:

Participating Contestants
Popularity of your updates as measured by the number of likes they receive
The amount of interest in your content as measured by the number of shares
Quantity of visits to your site as a result of clicks
You should monitor the results of your social media challenge across all platforms to determine how best to use your resources going forward.

Step 2: Establish the Rules of the Competition

Establishing the particulars of your social media competition is the next step.

The features of successful contests mentioned above, such as sticking to the rules, staying on-brand, and creating it entertaining, should guide your thinking when you come up with ideas for your next contest.

Likewise, you should give some thought to what exactly constitutes success in this competition. Do you plan to carefully assess each entry, or will all entrants simply have their names entered into a random drawing?

You should choose a prize for the competition last. It’s important that the prize you offer is both desirable and affordable so that you can attract as many participants as possible while still turning a profit. Create a plan for spending. Next, consider what kinds of contest awards are in keeping with your brand and would be appealing to your demographic.

Step 3: Pick a platform to promote your contest on social media.

As soon as you know what kind of contest you’ll be hosting, you may choose the best social media site to promote it on.

Holding your contest across numerous social media platforms at once is a smart move. Nearly half of all brands today use Instagram as well as Facebook to host contests.

More people will see your contest if it is promoted across several platforms. On the other hand, it’s possible that the same person will enter the contest many times, which can cause administrative headaches.

In addition, some competitions function better on some platforms than others.

Instagram, for one, is primarily an image-sharing platform, so contests that focus on visuals tend to do better there than text-only ones.

Step 4: spread the word about the contest you’re doing on social media.

Spreading the word about your social media challenge may be done in two ways: organically and financially.

To promote their events, about half of all brands spend money. In most cases, a click on a paid ad promoting a contest will cost you $0.18.

To get the word out about your social media event, you don’t need to spend money on ads.

You can boost the exposure of your contest by requiring participants to post your content to their social media profile.

Marketing your contest via email is another great option for reaching out to your present audience. By interacting with your current leads, you increase the likelihood that they will spread the word about your contest (as practically all contest entrants post about their participation on their social media profiles).

Create a custom hashtag for entrants to use in posts related to your social media competition. This has the potential to increase brand awareness and spread positive word of mouth about the product.