5 Tips for Creating a Successful Social Media Contest
Clay McDaniel is the principal and co-founder of social media marketing agency, Spring Creek Group. Find him via @springcreekgrp on Twitter.
One of the best ways to drive engagement and build word of mouth traffic about your brand is to run a contest via social media channels. Not only does it engage consumers with your brand in a fun and exciting way, it results in a treasure-trove of customer information, preferences, and feedback you can then mine to improve your business. And, best of all, launching an online contest can be very inexpensive.
However, there is a subtle art to social contests. Your brand needs to appear neither too “cheesy” nor too “salesy,” and you must deliver a prize that people really want. This can be a standard product or gift card, or a “notoriety” prize, such as publishing a winner’s video. What’s more, the contest itself has to be fun and easy to participate in. Few prizes are worth doing something extremely boring, monotonous, or complicated.
Here are five specific strategies you can follow to launch and manage a social contest, and leverage it to deliver real business value.
1. Define Your Marketing Goal
Every contest you launch should meet a specific marketing goal. Do you want to drive awareness of a new product or service? Collect a list of customers interested in a specific product segment? Encourage new participants to use your company’s social networking channels? There are many valid reasons to launch a contest, but it’s important to know ahead of time what you’re trying to accomplish. This goal will set the tone for your contest strategy.
2. Get Creative
Here’s the fun part: Creating your contest. The sky’s the limit when it comes to the type of contests you can launch. Here are a few ideas:
- A video contest inviting users to create a new commercial for one of your products
- A user-generated content contest that awards the best ‘personal experience stories’
- A photo contest related to your product or service
- A product invention contest with a large cash prize
Of course, your contest can be short and offer a small prize, or longer and more involved. Check out the Startup Nation Home Based 100 business creation competition that received thousands of entries and high-profile sponsors for an idea of just how big a contest can become.
3. Leverage Social Channels
The best part about online contests is how easy it is to take them viral, encourage participation, and link them into your social marketing activities. Promote your contest via Facebook (), Twitter (), your company blog, and all other social channels, as well as via traditional marketing channels such as print, e-mail, and in-store signage.
Just search the word contest on Twitter to see hundreds of contests going on right now. The best contests are intensely social by nature, because people like to play games and contests together, and most people love to share the chance to win a cool prize with friends and family. Ensure your contest is easily sharable by embedding “share this” links on the contest site, on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube (), and everywhere else people will come across it.
Use a social media tracking tool like Meteor Solutions to see which people and sites are sharing your contest, then promote your contest more heavily to those communities. Make sure your contest spreads like wildfire by encouraging easy “copy/paste” sharing using the Bit.ly () URL shortener for the links to your contest location online. Most importantly, allow the contest participants to vote to choose the winner, which keeps the audience interacting with one another and engaged long after each person has submitted their entry.
4. Finish the Contest
Everyone loves a winner, so make sure you don’t let your contest drag on too long. A typical social contest runs about four weeks –- longer, of course, if it’s more complex (e.g. programming a software algorithm or inventing a new product). When the winner is chosen, do a PR push to publicize their win. Of course, use Facebook and Twitter to promote the winner like mad. Go back to your social media tracking software and find out which people and social sites are talking most about the winner, then post comments on those networks to drive even more interest in the winner.
5. Measure the Contest
Of course launching a contest wasn’t just for fun, it was to achieve a specific marketing goal. So after the contest is done, you need to measure the impact it had on brand engagement, clickthrough to your site, conversion, and bottom-line sales. Again, you can use your social media tracking tool to measure all of these success metrics. Find out whether your contest drove as much traffic to your site as you had hoped, and whether this traffic resulted in conversion, however you may measure that (e.g. purchases, newsletter subscriptions, Twitter followers, etc.).
Many brands have done a great job with social contests. Spring Creek Group, for example, created a social media contest to drive interest and traffic during the launch of the Microsoft Bing search engine last summer. Bing () launched The Bing Jingle Contest, and invited people to upload user-generated video “jingles” about Bing to their official YouTube channel. Bing then promoted the videos via its Facebook Page, Twitter updates, and other social channels. The video with the most views and highest ratings would be crowned the winner, with the creator receiving a $500 gift card.
Overall, the contest garnered 27 video entries, over 238,000 views, 550 comments on the videos, and 2,200 tweets. The word of mouth generated by the contest was phenomenal, and was covered by many top blogs. The contest took on a life of its own, generating both defenders and detractors over the winning video.
More Great Contest Examples
Marin Software’s Biggest Search Geek Contest: This is a fun and very popular contest, now in its second year, that pits smart search marketers against one another for a free pass to SMX West — double points for creating a cool B2B social contest.
#TriviaTues: Fancast, Comcast’s competitor to Hulu (), promotes #TriviaTues, a weekly trivia event where Twitter users who follow @FancastTrivia and answer twenty trivia questions can win free DVDs, movie tickets, and t-shirts.
Moonfruit’s Win a Macbook Pro Everyday for 7 Days: Moonfruit, provider of do-it-yourself web site building tools for small businesses, recently completed this hugely successful contest. You can see results and entries on their web site.
