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6 Essential Tips For Launching A Successful Social Media Contest

Andrew Black

Updated: Jun 5, 2020


Who doesn't like winning free stuff! A social media contest is a great way to build brand awareness or capture valuable data about your consumers. It's also a great way to start engaging with your followers.

Pixel Pigeon is going to break it down for you. We're going to share all the best tips about launching your own social media contest, the things you just can't leave out in order to be successful.

Best Tips For Social Media Contests

Tip# 1

Decide if you're going to use a tool or platform to manage and launch your campaign (we highly recommend you do, we will cover the best ones in another post) or if you will be handling the data and entry gate in-house. This step is important as it relates directly to the type of contests that will be available to you. If you are going the in-house route we recommend the golden rule of keeping it simple, as the more complex you make it, the more work and coding you may need to do on your landing page. A landing page is where you will ask for the data required to enter your contest, such as first and last name, and email of course. (pssst, those emails are the most valuable part!)

If you're going to use a software to manage your contest, then this will allow you to use templates and open up a variety of contests you can run, One of our favorites here at Pixel Pigeon, is the Points for Actions style contests, where you would reward your participants with extra entries for extra actions such as following you on Twitter and YouTube, or visiting your website.

Tip# 2

Set clear goals for your contest, this will help you determine what your call to actions should be, as well as the type of contest you may want to run. Maybe a Hashtag contest or Photo contest where you can generate a ton of awesome user generated content (UGC) is better for you, than a Actions for Points contest. Knowing your goals and what you want out of the contest is an important factor here, this way you know the contest performed well or not and you can adjust your future contests based on the data. Some common goals you will see tossed around are brand awareness, page views on a targeted landing page, selling courses, growing followers or sometimes simply gathering customer emails to later use in your email campaigns. Knowing the goal for your contest before you start will help you ensure every piece is catered to that. Launching a successful social media contest can be easy with these tips.

Tip# 3

Make your prize VALUABLE! Prizes that we recommend are obviously prizes that are low in cost. Giving away your own products or services is always a good idea. You can also try reaching out to local businesses who may want to partner in on the contest in exchange for logo placement on your flyer and marketing materials, this has always been one of my go to secrets for finding creative prizes. Remember, you're asking a lot from them to spend a minute or two filling out your form, now days attention is short, so make sure your prize is exciting enough to get their attention and make sure you get creative with your copy-writing.

A good example is when Gillies Coffee did a Stocking Stuffer Giveaway, where they gave out an Aeropress coffeemaker and 12 oz. bag of coffee to two lucky winners. The prize may not have been the craziest thing in the world, but their hook was effective and the timing was clever. You go Gillies!

How To Run A Social Media Contest | Pixel Pigeon

Credit: @WishPond

Tip# 4

Don't sit back and wait for people to "discover" your contest! This is big one, "If you build it, they will come" does NOT apply here. You could have spent a ton of time coming up with an awesome prize and triple checked your copy, but if you do not promote, you will not get many entries.

Pixel pigeon is going to share some serious tips on how to make sure your contest is successful, you ready for it?

FACEBOOK IS NOT DEAD! If you don't have a budget to spend on boosting your post, or getting some Facebook & Instagram ads to help you increase your contest exposure, then take to Facebook! There are avenues there for you to share your contest manually, with relevant groups, pages and forums. Spend time wandering the vastness of the internet to find out where your target audience spends time and engage! You can also include the contest in your current newsletters or start a newsletter, now is the perfect time. Post it in your blog, post it on everything you own! Send it to all of your phone contacts and ask them to share it too. There is never enough promotion to be done, so get to it.

How to Social Media Contest

Tip# 5

Next up is an important one, pay attention to your local rules and regulations. Make sure you cover all rules and guidelines for entry and double check that you covered what dates it will be running, what time and date the prize will be announced and that your prize is allowed in the areas you plan to run the contest. You can read up on some of the rules below:

Tip# 6

Last, but most certainly not least. Utilize the data you collect from your contest wisely! A lot of businesses tend to waste the valuable data they get from their contests. You get a lot of great data such as your customers emails, you can add other questions to the form that fit your needs as well. Use this data to strengthen your marketing campaigns.

We at Pixel Pigeon hope these tips help you to launch successful contests across social media. We know there is lot that goes into creating a successful contest and we want to provide a valuable resource for business owners across the globe!

Yours Truly,

Andrew Black


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Las Vegas Marketing Agency

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Las Vegas, NV 89169

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