Hosting a social media competition or giveaway is a great way to increase your reach on social media. Not only does it start an online conversation about your business, but it can help to create a better brand awareness and generate more leads. After all, who doesn’t like getting free goodies?

Giving out some sort of freebie, whether its a product or service, builds a positive brand image and boosts the engagement on your social media platforms. Another perk of running a social media competition or giveaway is that it’s an easy way to promote your business without being excessively promotional.

What is a social media competition?

Essentially, it’s a strategy or promotional tactic that can instantly create buzz around your business online. A social media competition will usually be set up to encourage users to engage on your platform. Whether it’s liking the post, liking your page, resharing the post or tagging a friend in the comments. The more engagement through these likes, shares and tags, the more people your competition will reach and so the more people that will see your post and become aware of your business. 

Let’s take a look at what goes into planning social media giveaways.

Planning a competition or giveaway

#1 Objective

A key element of any strategy is to ensure your objective is well thought out. Decide why you want to run a competition. Here are a few objectives that you can base your marketing campaign on:

• Increase your followers: You can use competitions or giveaways to build your audience and numbers of followers on social media.
• Grow your mailing list: As a part of any social media giveaway, you can ask people to submit their email addresses in order to grow your mailing list and keep your fans updated on any offers and promotions.
• Boost brand awareness: Giveaways and competitions can be a great way to make more people familiar with your brand. To increase brand awareness, you can ask people to tag their friends on your posts.
• Drive engagement: Whatever your campaign objective is, any competition or giveaway will drive some sort of engagement on social media. Businesses usually ask people to like, comment, and share competition posts to win the the prize.
• Promote new products: Giveaways can be a great tool to put the spotlight on your new line of products. They can help generate more leads and boost sales.

#2 Which platform?

For any business, it’s important to maintain a strong presence on social media. However, not all social media platforms are equal so you need to consider what is most appropriate for your campaign objective.

Based on your target audience, industry, and expertise, certain social media platforms may be better suited for your business.

#3 The prize

When it comes to social media competitions and giveaways, people participate to win whatever freebie it may be. So, you need to make sure that the prize you offer is appealing enough to get people involved. If your prize isn’t attractive enough, you may see a lack of engagement and overall the competition won’t reach your objective.

Relate the prize to your brand, whether its a relevant product, gift card or loyalty points, keep it consistent with your brand message. Whatever you decide to give away, make sure you’re giving your customers a taste of your business’ services or products.

#4 The rules

Now you’ve made some of the most important decisions regarding the competition or giveaway, it’s time to make a plan and set the rules. The first step of running a giveaway campaign is to decide on the timeline. Here are some factors you should consider:

• Timeline: Set the dates when you plan to start and end the giveaway. Don’t forget to mention the end date in your launch caption. It’s a great way to create a sense of urgency.
• Rules: Who is eligible to participate in the contest? If you have any limitations such as age or location, again state these in your launch post.
• Mode of participation: You should mention what a user must do to enter the contest. Is it to comment a friend? Or reshape on a story?
• Prize: The prize needs to be the star of the giveaway. Make sure you clearly feature it on your posts and in the caption – it might be good to include the prize in the main visual.
• Winner announcement: When are you going to announce a winner? How many winners will you pick? Mention this in the announcement of the giveaway and share them with your audience to keep them hooked.
• Posting Schedule: When it comes to social media giveaways, you can’t just post once and forget about it. Talk about it often on different social media platforms. You can also send your subscribers emails about it. Also, run social media ads if needed. Try and write a posting schedule to keep on top of what is going out and when.

How do you pick the winner?

The essential thing to choosing your winner is to make sure it is completely random. You can either use a random winner generator to keep things fair and transparent. There are many tools and generators like these available online, you just need a Google search. Also, giveaway tools like VYPER and Rafflecopter have features for winner selection that you can use.