Running a social media promotion is a great way to engage your audience and grow your fan base. We are always seeing and sharing best practices with our most successful customers in terms of audience engagement. There are always lessons to learn and areas to improve upon. Consider these possibilities and see how they can make your next promotion a huge success that will exceed your expectations and get more entries!
1) Promote It
In order to garner entries and votes, you need to actively promote your promotion to your existing audience, and possibly to a larger audience by utilizing display ads. One of the best ways to promote your promotion is by simply posting about it on your Facebook wall. Timely reminders and updates to your existing audience will help ensure that your promotion is a success. Email reminders, social media posts and website mentions are all opportunities to promote your promotion. For more information on promoting your promotions check out this recent post.
2) Offer an Enticing Prize
People enter promotions for a chance to win a great prize, so make sure your prize is great! The best prizes are relevant to your brand, and resonate with your audience. Making the prize a limited or once in a lifetime opportunity can help build excitement and get more entries. Offering a low value prize or a generic prize is a common mistake, so always keep in mind the value of your prize in relation to what you are asking of the user. This leads us to our #3 reason why you didn’t get entries in your contest.
3) Lower the Barriers
You always need to keep in mind what barriers to entry exist within your promotion. In other words, the more you ask of a user, the less likely they will be to enter. Of course, volume of entries is not always the most important metric, so consider what your goals and objectives are. If you want maximum engagement of a few die-hard fans, then asking them to create a short video for your Facebook video contest may work perfectly. If you are looking to grow your audience and get lots of entries, a sweepstakes is going to have the lowest barrier of entry because all you are asking of the user is for them to enter their email address. Something to keep in mind with a photo contest or video contest is how difficult it is for the entrant to produce the photo or video. In some cases, you may be asking for a photo type that an entrant would likely already have on file – such as a baby photo. If you ask for a photo of user holding your product while dancing…well, they are going to have to produce that photo specifically for your promotion, which takes more effort.
Crafting a successful social media promotion takes some planning and strategy, but it is well worth the time and effort up front to ensure your promotion meets your expectations. Always put yourself in your fans’ shoes, would you want to enter your promotion? If you can proudly answer yes to that question, you’re well on your way to a great promotion!
