Social media contests can expand your reach, raise brand awareness, and grow your business. The engagement and the viral potential they create are directly proportional to their allure.
So, how to make them irresistible and supercharge your business? We’ve rounded up some of the top ideas.
Organize Sweepstakes for Your Top-Selling Products
Sweepstakes are great for generating leads, especially when you give away your top-selling products.
Ask your followers to participate by signing up for your email newsletter and/or leaving any other contact information you may need. Rarely anyone will resist signing up when they have an opportunity to get your best product.
If you’re a SaaS business, you can offer a paid version of your software for free. It could be a free six-month or year plan or a completely different approach if you find something that works better for you.
Host Giveaways with Influencers
Social media influencers are excellent at engaging people in various brands. They give honest reviews of the products they’ve used, so people trust them and rely on their opinion when making purchasing decisions.
So, find micro-influencers (they have higher engagement rates) in your niche and have them promote your social contest.
Make sure they match your target audience and don’t focus on their reach. Keep up with engagement metrics – likes, comments, and shares. Those show if their followers are paying attention to what they’re saying or doing.
Ask for User-Generated Content
According to the latest user-generated content stats, 48% of consumers agree that UGC helps them discover new products.
That’s why 86% of businesses use it in social media marketing campaigns, because of a boost in engagement by 28%.
So, host a contest where your followers need to share photos or short videos of anything related to your products or services.
For instance, you could ask them to capture themselves while using your products. If you sell experiences, you could ask them to capture inspiring, adventurous, romantic, or other moments related to your offerings.
Don’t forget to create branded hashtags!
Create a Quiz for Entering a Contest
Utilizing a quiz creator for social media contests can be beneficial to your business in several ways.
Quizzes can help you generate leads, raise brand awareness, boost sales, and expand your reach globally, as they have viral potential.
If you create a quiz that addresses your audience’s pain points or is simply fun to take, people flock to it. Create exciting results, and they won’t resist sharing them.
Add a contest into the equation, and you’ll have yourself a winning combination.
So, find a user-friendly quiz builder, create a quiz that people will need to take to enter a contest, and watch your leads spike.
Host Buy-to-Enter Contests
Buy-to-Enter social media contests are a definite win-win. They help you boost your sales and website traffic while attracting new customers.
The key is to set a low shopping limit to entice people to enter. More importantly, you should offer something valuable as a prize so that you really compel your followers to buy and participate.
Switch It Up with Comment-to-Enter
This social contest type is the most popular nowadays, as they have the power to generate tons of leads.
You can ask followers to comment on a photo or video of your giveaway offer and tag friends to enter a contest. Their comments should include the reasons why they love your products.
Some brands even require those tagged friends to follow their pages/accounts for the entry to be eligible.
This kind of promotion raises brand awareness and expands your campaign’s reach. What’s more, it helps you gather product feedback so that you know what and how to improve.
Launch Instagram Caption Contests
Did you know that 91% of Instagram posts with 1,000+ comments are contests? So, vamp up your Instagram account today!
Start an Instagram caption contest where your followers need to unleash their creativity.
Ask them to come up with a funny or otherwise interesting caption for a photo related to one of your products or services. The most creative caption wins, and the winner gets that product or service as a prize.
Ask Followers to Vote for Their Favorite Products
Facebook and Instagram are great platforms for creating polls and learning more about your target audience.
To enter one of your contests, create a poll with several of your products and ask followers to vote for their favorites.
Use a random number generator to select the winner (just like with most of these contests) from all those who voted. Obviously, reward the winner with the product they voted for as you now know what they want.
This kind of social contest is also excellent for collecting invaluable feedback. You’ll know which products are your audience’s favorites, so you’ll know what to invest in and what features to focus on when launching new products.
If, for instance, two of them end up with many more votes than the other items, you can start offering them as a bundle to boost your sales and revenue.
Create Q&A Contests
Q&A contests are the simplest to organize, as they can’t last longer than a few minutes. Simply ask a question regarding your brand, and the fastest user to post a correct answer wins.
To make the most of this kind of promotion, organize these contests frequently. That way, people will regularly check your social channels for a chance to participate and win exciting prizes. While they do, you can continue capturing their attention with other offers.
Organize a Social Scavenger Hunt
Social media scavenger hunts can shoot your engagement rates through the roof, as they’re fun and tap into people’s curiosity.
The whole gist of this contest is to ask a question and hide clues all over your social media, including your photos and videos.
Once people find them and decipher the answer, they should type it into an appropriate widget on your website. That should sign them into your email list, allowing you to choose the winner with a random number generator.
Conclusion
Social media contests are fantastic for spreading the word about your business, generating more leads, boosting engagement, and increasing sales and revenue.
Giving away your products also shows you care about your customers, and don’t shy away from rewarding them for their loyalty.
So, start organizing these cool contests today and take your business to the next level!
