How to Grow Your Brand through Social Media Contests
Running a business is all about meeting the needs of your customers. The more engaged your target audience is, the longer they will stay with your brand and become your brand advocates.
You may regularly publish quality content across your social platforms and post videos and infographics that your audience finds useful and do all the things you’re “supposed to do”. However, this strategy isn’t sufficient when it comes to staying ahead of the competition. Creating quality content is great – but creating shareable content is even better. A great way to get in front of more faces and do things that people want to share is to do a contest or giveaway on your social page.
Social Media Contests
Social media contests are promotional tactics through which businesses can attract and engage their target audience and gain new followers. Giving away a prize or an experience exclusively through your page is a fast and effective way to raise brand awareness through increased visibility. For instance, you can ask your audience to share their images with your product in hand or record a video with their smartphone and share it across social platforms. You can also oblige your audience to invite 3 to 5 friends to your page in order to qualify for the contest. If you’re planning to run a social media contest, you may find the following statistics useful:
68% of participants are older than 18 years
The best duration to run effective contests is 25 days
As compared to advertising, it helps you attract 10 times more audience
The average time spent by a user on a contest page is 2 minutes and 30 seconds
Social media users are more likely to participate in a contest if their friends recommend it
Most European brands launch contests in June or November
Social Media Contests: Benefits
Raise Brand Awareness
Launching a social media contest is an effective way to spread awareness about your business. This approach particularly benefits small businesses that have recently created their social accounts. However, well-established and large businesses can also spread the word about their brands through social contests.
Social media contests are extremely helpful in raising brand awareness since the audience can participate without much effort. Most social media users are likely to show interest in competitions, mainly because of the rewards and incentives it offers with little to no effort, and it gets them something cool they can post on their own accounts.
Aside from inviting your followers to participate in the competition, encourage them to share the contest details with their social circle as well. The more people participate in the contest, the more exposure your brand will receive.
For this purpose, you can make it a rule that if a social media user wants to participate in the contest, they ought to like your page or follow your account as well as invite two or more friends to your page.
Expand Your Follower Base
Social media helps businesses maintain a social presence and interact with their existing and potential customer base. In order to expand your social media follower base, you should consider running social media contests.
In November 2007, Facebook launched fan pages. This Facebook feature worked as a great help for brands since they could now stay in touch with their customers. This was when the idea of social media contests came into existence.
Businesses can now reach their potential customers through contests and encourage them to like the social media page.
Moreover, social media contests are extremely valuable since they keep your followers engaged. This engagement leads to an increase in sales and revenue.
Build a Positive Brand Image
Maintaining a social media presence portrays a positive image of your brand, it establishes goodwill and gives you a competitive edge. In order to further enhance the efficacy of your social media marketing strategy, consider launching social media contests.
In today’s world, no marketer can overlook the importance of keeping their audience engaged and there’s no better way to drive engagement than running contests on social platforms. When you launch contests and reward winners with valuable gifts, it builds a community around your brand and you can also gain the trust of your target audience.
Collect Valuable Data
In this digital era, data is extremely valuable. Launching social media contests is a great way to collect valuable customer information. Through contests, you can build a comprehensive email list.
If you choose to require a form to fill out, make it a rule that they provide you with their contact information such as email address and/or contact number. Refrain from adding too many fields in the registration form; otherwise, it’ll only drive them away.
People are cautious to share their personal information online, but if you provide them the right incentive or reward, many will show interest and provide you with their contact info. After gaining permission from your audience, you can use this contact information to carry out promotional campaigns.
Tips for Social Media Contests
A social contest is still an effective way to grow your follower base within a brief timeframe. But what makes it impactful is the choice of prizes. Go for valuable items that are closely related to your business. For instance, if you sell sports equipment, you can award the winners free sports gear.
Social media contests prove fruitful only if they target the right audience. So, understand your audience first and then launch a contest to increase engagement.
Before you launch a contest, you should also develop a post-contest strategy. This will guide you on how you can make the most of the collected information. Once the results are out, engage your leads to increase the ROI.
Launching social media contests is an effective strategy to raise brand awareness, attract and retain followers, and gather valuable information. Cohn Media is a professional online marketing service that can help you with social media promotions and contests.