Creating successful social media competitions – part 1

How can I attract customers with a social media competition? How do I create an appealing social media competition? Find the answers to these questions and much more besides in this two-part post.

Social media competitions are a popular way for companies and individuals to boost interaction and attract followers on their social media platforms. These competitions can be an entertaining and exciting way of interacting with your audience while promoting your brand or product.

In this blog post, I’ll explain the benefits of running a social media competition and give you some tips on how to create a successful competition.

A competition on social media – whether on Instagram, Facebook, YouTube or another platform – enables you to increase your reach and interactions enormously in the short term.

Tips on how to create a successful social media competition

1. Define your goals: it’s important to define your goals before you get started. What do you wish to achieve with this competition? Are you trying to attract new followers, increase engagement or promote a particular product or service? Once you have a clear goal in mind, you can tailor your competition towards achieving it.
2. Choose the right platform: social media platforms have different target groups and functions, so it’s important to choose the right platform for your competition. If you’d like to run a photo competition, for example, Instagram is potentially the best option, whereas Facebook may be a better choice for a quiz.
3. Offer an impressive prize: the prize that’s up for grabs is the main incentive to take part in your competition, so you should make it compelling. Consider offering a prize that’s relevant to your brand or product and sought after by your target group.
4. Make it easy to take part: people are more likely to participate if there aren’t too many requirements to fulfil, such as “tag five friends and share this post, tagging me at the same time”.
5. Use an appropriate image that makes it immediately obvious what the post is about. On platforms such as Instagram, people often disregard the text and look only at the image. Your image should encourage them to read the text.

In my test, I didn’t ask people to follow my account as I only wanted to attract followers who were interested in me. However, I noticed that I attracted a few new ones, despite not asking participants to follow me.

If people are required to follow someone to take part in a competition, it’s very likely that they will unfollow them afterwards.

I also noticed that many people shared and liked my post, even though I didn’t ask anyone to do so. I presume that this is such a common condition for many competitions that participants automatically share and like posts.

To generate interaction, I gave away four smaller prizes and described them briefly in the images.

Each participant had to comment on which prize they wanted to win, which encouraged interaction.

You now have a few tips to take away on creating an online competition.

My most important tip will follow next week, in part two of the post. After all, what’s a competition if the winner isn’t drawn or if the post is deleted due to a lack of compliance with platform guidelines?