Most brands failed to reach their target due to not having good ideas on social media contests. If you are new in business don’t make the same kind of mistake. Before setting up a contest for your brand you must have a proper idea of how the contest works.
Well, This blog will help you to learn how to organize a social media contest to promote your brand with the 10 best contest ideas!
With these contest ideas, you’ll be able to increase engagement, reach new audiences, and boost your brand awareness.
Choose the contest idea that best fits your goals and start promoting your brand today!
Read the blog to learn more!
What are the Best Contest Ideas for Social Media?
Generating the best social media contest ideas is a long-term process to grow a brand with loyal and active followers. These followers help to generate leads with a good number of conversions. These followers are earned through social media contests.
Individuals follow these brands hoping to participate in a social media contest that will grant them a discount, free coupons, or other forms of benefits. These benefits are given to followers in return the brands get free marketing.
Marketers use these social media contests as a method to spread brand awareness and do the promotion of their products and services. Therefore, the followers/audiences promote the business knowingly by expecting something in return. The audiences are one of the most reliable and important individuals to build your brand.
How to organize a social media contest to promote your brand?
People love contests. Most of the audience loves to win contests and enjoy free gifts. Even if it’s a social media contest that can help get more audiences on your page and level up your business. There are lots of contests you can apply for your business growth. I have given you some ideas below but before that, you must know what to do before the contests are set.
1. The Purpose Behind the Contest Ideas for Social Media
Every contest has a motive or a purpose behind it. A brand doesn’t launch a contest without any reason. It could be that the brand is trying to promote an existing product or service or it is trying to launch a new product in the market.
So before a contest, you must set your goal. As an example- What is the endgame of the contest? What do you want to achieve? Do you want to expand your brand awareness through social media, or do you want to generate leads for your business? Or do you simply want to gain more followers/page likes/views/ drive traffic to other social media sites etc?
What is the endgame of the contest? What do you want to achieve? Do you want to expand your brand awareness through social media, do you want to generate leads for your business? Or do you simply want to gain more followers?
The intention of the social media contest should be clear from the beginning. Therefore, before launching your social media contest, identify your purpose or intention. In order to come up with a solid strategy, the purpose and the end goal are really important.
2. Know the target audience
Before setting a contest you first have to select the product you are going to promote through the contest. After that, know the target audience for those particular products. Customers will love to have that product and love to participate in the contest to grab that product. Then select a platform where the audiences are mostly available. Like if you are organizing a contest for selling t-shirts and your target audience is 20-35 aged audience then Instagram will be a suitable platform for you to promote your content.
A brand with the most dedicated followers will be successful and there is no doubt about that. However, in order to build such dedicated followers, you have to know who your target audience is and what interests them.
Well, Facebook is the best social media platform when it comes to user data. Facebook will offer all kinds of data; you only have to know how to properly utilize them. Once you determine or ‘Know” these audiences, you can start offering your promotional deals through the contest.
3. Holding a popular type of contest
After analyzing your target audience, choose the type of content you want to go with. Choosing the wrong Social Media Contest could end up ruining the whole campaign. So, always pick carefully which contest will benefit you the most. For example, Some Social Media Contest that you can apply are :
- Video Contests
- Vote Contests
- Photo Contests
- Content Commenting Contests
- User-Generated Campaigns
To set a perfect type of contest you can do a little bit of research. As an example – for that particular product (T-shirt) what kind of contest your competitors have organized before, & what type of contest gives them the highest responses?
4. Promote your contest
You can promote your giveaway gifts through free marketing or by boosting. By this, you can reach a wider scope audience by which the participation of contestants will increase. This means more engagement with the content. Brands can exploit Social media contests to connect an ever-increasing number of followers and create engagement and traffic to the page. It is the most ideal approach to increasing natural preferences offers and impressions.
5. Creating fair contest rules and hashtags
The rules and regulations of the contest have to be mentioned in the contest guidelines. Hashtags help the contest look good and, in many cases, help to reach audiences. Hashtags are a great way for audiences to find your brand. This is especially the case for Twitter and Instagram. These two platforms use hashtags to help the audience what they are looking for as well as help the brand to reach wider audiences.
6. Use the right tools for promotion
If you need to run your promotion and marketing efficiently, you need to consistently utilize appropriate tools to run it. Utilizing challenge programming like Hootsuite or Rafflecopter for social media contests is most likely the most ideal approach to administer it.
7. Charitable Campaigns
Request your followers and supporters to assist and support the brand in doing a fundraiser contest for a social reason. Members who raise the most assets can like the reason and furthermore be compensated with your marked prize pack.
8. Work with Influencers in Your Social Media Contest
In case you’re searching for an approach to attract the attention of your brand, have a giveaway with an influencer. Hire a social media influencer, ask them to announce the contest, and at the end of the contest ask them to announce the winner & give a prize.
Social media Influencers come with a crowd of people from all over the internet prepared to connect with your brand. In this way, it should not shock anyone when influencer promotion made it to the top three most prominent advertising methodologies in recent years.
9. Use Contest Hashtags to Promote Brand Awareness
Hashtags help followers effectively find content without the issue of looking perpetually. On the off chance that you made a hashtag and you’d like to make it increasingly discoverable; you’ll have to build commitment to it. This implies getting individuals to re-tweet, use them in the post, and snap on your hashtag when via web-based networking media. Look at the image of how ____ using a hashtag for their contest.
10. Determine the Winner
Remain straightforward when explaining the guidelines for your contests, and make the determination procedure clear to your followers as it so happens. For example, on the off chance that you are running a photograph contest, obviously notice in your standards that photos should be significant and exceptional.
In the event that the winner is selected by the number of votes before the finish of the contest, take a screen capture of the successful section with a period stamp. Additionally, reveal how and when you want to report the winner and the components you will remember during the winner selection procedure. You can inform the victor of the contest by email or via social media.
9 best creative social media contest ideas for your business
1. Get User-Generated Content
It’s quite simple, the followers are the unpaid contributors/fans/consumers/ end-users, etc. Therefore, that makes UGC a form of content that has been created and posted by the followers themselves.
Most user-generated content provided by unpaid contributors is just willing to share their experiences with other participants. Marketers don’t need to empty their pockets since the users are in charge of the promotion.
2. Tag your Friends-Contest
Tag a friend-Contest is one of the best Social Media Contest ideas. This social media contest can give maximum reach to your post and even your brand account.
This is simply a tricky way to bring more audiences from your audience. For example,
1) Share your product image, ask your audience to tag a friend who loves this product. This contest will help you to get your actual target audience.
2) Write a post and ask your audience to tag their friends. Whoever will tag maximum and the maximum has really hit liked your brand page will be announced as a winner.
3. Create a brand filter for your own Contest:
This Social media contest idea helps you to grow your brand publicity. There are a lot of big brands that make their own AR filters or image frames specially for Snapchat, & Instagram and ask their audience to capture images using those filters and offer attractive gifts to hampers for the winner who uploads their pictures using their filters or frames.
You can apply these strategies. Canva will help you to create a photo frame or any kind of social media contest post. Learn for free about how Canva works –
4. Follow to win the Contest:
“Follow to win the contest” is good to get more organic reach. You can ask your audience to follow your another brand account and suggest others to follow. You can offer gifts to your audience with the condition of sharing your brand account link to their personal account.
For example – You have 5000 k reach on your Facebook page. But only 2800 on your Instagram brand account. Share your Instagram brand account URL to your Facebook page, and host a contest with certain conditions that whoever will follow your Instagram account, you will give them 3% off on their next purchase.
5. Write a Caption Contest:
If you want to bring more organic reach to your social media account the caption contest will play a good role. You’ll have to upload a photo (It’s better to upload your niche relevant photo) and then ask your audience for a perfect caption for the photo.
This contest will bring maximum comments on that particular post and thus your post will spread on social media. Your audience will compete with each other to suggest you the best caption. Whose caption will get most like you can give the audience an attractive gift hamper.
Check out the image. It could be the best example of a caption contest.
6. Hashtag Challenges:
Hashtags contests are mostly used to increase brand value & identity. Select a catchy hashtag for your brand and tell your audience to upload photos or videos on social media using your hashtag on the caption. Choose the winner who gets the maximum engagement on their post using your hashtag.
For example – Famous brands like Cocacola and KitKat also run hashtag contests by offering prizes to their audience.
7. Follower Milestone Contests:
This content will help you to grow your followers and brand identity too. Organize a content named (30 k milestone). Run the contest with the specific condition that if your brand page/brand account hits the target number (30k followers) you will give 10% off on all products for all customers who share your account with their known.
8. Storytelling Contest:
Apart from being commercial, building an emotional connection with your audience is important more or less. And you can do so by executing this social media contest. Select a specific topic (Good to select the topic relevant to your niche) and then ask for stories or experiences from your audience based on the topic. Let all the audience select the best story to choose the winner. You will find out about them depending on the audience’s response.
It will build up a non-commercial connection with your audience and get organic reach for your page. Suppose, You sell fishing relevant T-shirts, You can ask your audience if there are any memorable stories behind buying T-shirts from your store. The audience will be excited to respond, and they will share their story and thus you will meet your target.
9. Answer the question contest:
Host a content where you will ask a question to test your audience’s general ideas. For Example, Post a question with 4 multiple choices and ask your audience the right answer. Choose 3 winners from the participants who will give the right answer and publish their images on your social media pages. This type of contest usually attracts the interest of your audience to comment on that particular post. High reached comments help a post to rank on social media. And thus, you will reach more engagement and connections.
For example, If you are working with the niche of fishing, You can post a picture of equipment for fishing and ask your audience the name of the equipment. You can provide 4 multiple choices too. The audience will answer the question and increase engagement for your page. Choose the winner and honor them with the gift you committed.
Conclusion
The primary goal of the best social media contest ideas is beneficial for your brand more than the followers who are getting gifts. The followers are highlighting your brand and whatever you are giving to them.