Social media contests are a nifty way to raise brand awareness, engage with your audience, increase your email list and promote your products or services. Any social media strategy should include contests because the real winner of the contest is your brand. There is no better way to increase brand loyalty, followers and engagement on social media.
The issue merchants face most of the time is finding social media contest ideas and be creative with them. In this article, we put together valuable information about how to effectively promote your brand online with a minimal promotional budget!
Steps to Run a Social Media Contest
- Set the goal and the budget of your contest
- Select the prizes (products, services, gift cards, tickets, etc.)
- Choose the social media networks to run the contest on & read the contest rules
- Promote your social media contest
- Analyze the contest results and think about how you can make it more interesting next time!
Apps to Run Social Media Contests
Rafflecopter
Launch a giveaway contest in just 3 minutes with this tool, prices starting at $13/month for the Basic version.
Shortstack
Shortstack is a great platform to run contests, collect leads, send emails, boost interactions, gather user-generated content and increase sales. It includes a variety of contests formats: giveaways, quizzes, forms, hashtags, instant win, refer-a-friend, comment contests, and useful analytics. Prices starting at $29/month for the Starter edition.
Pagemodo
Use Pagemodo to run promotions that match your marketing needs – engaging contests, sweepstakes, giveaways, coupons, and much more. Prices starting at $6.25/month for the Basic plan.
Gleam
Drive real user engagement by setting up giveaways, contests, and sweepstakes with Gleam. Prices starting at $10/month.
Heyo
Heyo helps you run contests, sweepstakes, interactive campaigns on social media, mobile and web. It supports photo & video contests, Instagram sweep, quizzes, multi-format contests, viral sweep and more. Prices starting at $25/month for the Basic package.
Woodbox
Woodbox has everything you need to create contests (giveaways, custom forms, coupons, polls, quizzes, photo contests, etc.) and to promote your business online. Prices starting at $37/month.
Wishpond
Wishpond includes 10 types of social media contests, it integrates with over 300 tools and it supports marketing automation as well. Prices starting at $49/month.
Strutta
Create great promotions with Strutta to drive more leads, run contests and build brand awareness. The do-it-yourself promotion builder starts at $250/promotion launch.
Conclusion
There is no limit to what you can do with social media contests to engage with your audience. Be creative with the contests you run and make it original for your business and for your followers. Most importantly, learn from the experience and do it again to get better results.
