A great way to engage your customers and fans is to run a user-generated video contest.  An online video contest will encourage your fans to create videos about your brand and products, giving your brand tons of great new video content that can virally spread brand awareness and increase your Facebook audience.  By inviting fans to create video content about your brand you will strengthen the consumer’s connection to your brand and inspire their creativity.  The consumer will feel involved in the process of generating content and will see his/her own work being displayed.  Branded video contests create a positive association with your brand that can be helpful when launching new products and generating awareness.

It is important to motivate users to share with friends and inspire interactive viewing, commenting, and sharing.  A great way to do this is to create a video gallery where fans can view, share, and vote on their favorite videos.

It is also important to consider that creating a video is time consuming and requires a good amount of effort from your fans.  With this in mind it is a good idea to allow an appropriate amount of time for fans to upload entries.  There is often a last minute flood of entries because fans will take their time to come up with an idea and then execute the video.  In order to ensure that these last minute entries are a part of the viewing, sharing, and voting process, you can allow a separate voting period after the contest has stopped receiving entries.

Video contests have the ability to be offered cross-channel on Facebook, a microsite, your own website, and on Youtube. They have become a great way to establish a relationship with your fans while collecting content and information about your fans and consumers.  For more information about video contests contact us today!