Posted By : Govinda Baniya
So, you’ve had a presence on social media for some time now and have built up a healthy follower/fan base, but what now? How do you keep those prospects engaged with your brand online?
With a little imagination and a dollop of creativity you can further capture your follower’s attention with a clever little competition or two.
Not only are competitions likely to be shared, therefore increasing your reach, they also provide a great way for you to gauge interest in your offering.
Generally speaking, your competition should seek to achieve one of the following:
- Sales and leads
- fans or followers
- email addresses or phone numbers
- heightened awareness of your brand
Before you start to think about your prize or the mechanics of your competition, make sure you have decided exactly what it is you want to achieve; you can then build your campaign around the preferred outcomes.
Top Tip: While giving away the latest Apple gadget might attract a high response rate, it is unlikely that the bulk of your entrants will actually have an interest in your business or brand.
Eyes on the Prize
The way in which you package and present your offering is crucial to your competition’s success. Make sure that the prize is exciting enough that it will attract attention but try and keep it pertinent to your brand.
Consider that when running a competition, although all eyes and PR will point to the winner, your ‘losing’ entrants are actually the most valuable to you. If your competition is engineered and targeted well, you’ll end up with a number of leads qualified enough to perhaps convert into future sales.
Be trendy
Consider aligning your competition alongside a national event. For example, if you run a business that sells chocolates, flowers or even pamper packages then mother’s day would be a great event to piggyback on.
If your business is a little more niche, there are many days, trade shows or even weeks that you might be able to ride on the wave of. For example; National Gardening Week, Social Media Week or the Printing Expo Exhibition. A Google search is likely to return plenty of options. The connection might not be obvious at first so be prepared to use your imagination a little.
Most events or occasions nowadays end up with their own hashtag. For those unfamiliar with the term, a hashtag is a way that users catalogue tweets on Twitter. They basically use the ‘#’ symbol followed by a word, phrase or acronym related to a particular theme.
Events and trade shows will usually have a specific hashtag that has been created by the management/marketing team whereas hashtags like #ilovemymum are likely to be thought up by Twitter users who have something to say on the topic of mother’s day.http://www.hashtags.org is a great tool for identifying hashtags, particularly those that are trending (used most frequently).
You can piggyback on the back of these often popular or trending hashtags by including them in tweets and updates about your competition. This is great because your tweets will reach a pool of twitter users that spans further than your existing network.
Finally, don’t forget to familiarise yourself with the relevant social media promotional guidelines and data collection laws! Failure to do so could put your business and brand at risk if you are seen to be misleading entrants with regards to what their data will actually be used for post contest.
What competitions have you run and have they been successful? Share your knowledge assist others and leave a comment please
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