How to Grow Your Online Communities Through Contests
For brands on social media, engagement is everything. You want to boost it, grow it, measure it and exploit it. But how? Social media contests are an effective way to excite and engage your audience. Let’s look at how you can optimize the connections you have with your audience through social interaction!
Why Social Media Contests?
Social media giveaways are a successful way of promoting your brand without spending a lot of money. Contests can boost online engagement, grow your social media presence, market an upcoming product and gather user generated content. It is important to first know what your goals are in order to choose the contest that is right for your brand.
Understand Your Audience
If you want to achieve your goals, then you need to know what audience you’re trying to reach. Remember that your contest should cater to your audience in order to increase engagement. For example, if you want to engage local movie enthusiasts and drive ticket sales, you can tie your contest in with memorabilia from an upcoming movie.
Experiment With Different Platforms
Today there are many new platforms available to experiment with in order to reach your audience. Different platforms appeal to different demographics. Understanding where your audience spends most of their time will help you narrow down which platforms you should utilize. Facebook can be used to target adults while instagram is geared more towards teens and young adults. Twitter is used most often by people in their 20s. Brands should do their research and take advantage of social media contests to engage with their followers. You can also partner with a digital marketing agency to help you understand your audience and how to target them.
Know What Type of Contest to Run
Once you narrow down what platforms to use and what audience you are trying to target, the next step is to think about the type of contest to run. Now that Instagram and Facebook live features are more popular than ever, it is easy to engage with customers with an active, visual and experience based campaign. Comment giveaways are a good way to get your audience involved with your brand. For example, asking them to tag people in the comments gives your brand more exposure and reach. Fan content campaigns not only involve your audience but also gives you access to customer generated content that you can use later.
You want to make it easy for your audience to participate! Make the rules simple and explain the contest clearly. State a deadline and stay transparent about how you will choose a winner.
Prize Matters
Social media contests can be a great way to enhance engagement, but you’ll still need to convince your customers that they should interact with you. The prize you give out will depend on the goal of the contest, and it needs to be something appealing to the people you want to reach and connect with. For instance, millennials are searching for ways to connect with people through experience. Re-think offering a tangible prize and consider how best to appeal to your audience through experience. By offering more attractive prizes, people are more likely to share your contest.
Using a Digital Marketing Agency
You might choose to employ the benefits of a digital marketing agency like Bright Age Digital Creative Agency to help you create unique contests on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Our past experience with social media contests will result in increased audience engagement and brand awareness.
