- Should you run a social media contest?
They look good, right?
(jazzy music)
You can use 'em to get more followers, more reach,
more engagement, more of loads of stuff.
In this video, we're going to look at the pros and cons
of running a social media contest.
Plus, if you hang around to the end,
I am going to share my eight-step process
for running a social media competition that gets results.
But let's start with the pros.
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Pro number one is it increases reach and engagement.
Successful competitions get lots of reach and engagement,
because as people comment, as they like,
as they share and tell their friends about the competition,
you're building up your engagement,
which gives you more reach,
which is great for brand awareness.
To get the most from this,
just make sure that your brand is really strong
on all the photographs or the videos
and all the texts that you're using.
That way, all those people you've reached will recognise you
the next time they see something from your business.
The downside of all this extra reach and engagement
is you're bound to reach a whole lot of the wrong people,
which could mean that the wrong people
are attracted to your business,
that people are seeing stuff that is irrelevant to them,
so they're hiding it or their marking as spam.
We'll talk about that more when we talk about the cons.
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Pro number two is it can help you grow your following.
This is probably the biggest reason
that people run contests on social media.
And it can work extremely well,
particularly if you collaborate with other businesses
or you choose to work with creators,
which is a code word for influencers,
and use some social ad spend to amplify your competition.
Pro number three is it can help you grow your email list.
According to HubSpot, four out of five marketers
say that they would rather give up social media
than email marketing.
If email marketing is something that's on your to-do list
or something that you already do,
a competition can be a really good way
to convert your social media following
into email subscribers.
You will tend to get less entries for a competition
where people have to input their email address,
because you're asking people to do a bit more work.
And plus, people don't like giving away their email address.
But it does mean that you'll be able to reach those people
even when the social media algorithms
hide your content from them.
(image whooshes) Pro number four
is that you will get more user-generated content.
That's UGC for short.
And according to a study from a Turn2,
UGC, and that refers to videos and photographs and reviews
and other content that's created
by a customer rather than a brand,
is huge at influencing purchasing decisions.
24% of the people they surveyed
said it was extremely influential
to their purchasing decision.
Plus, it increases purchasing confidence,
which means more people are going to trust you
because they've seen that UGC.
Now, if you create a social media contest
that encourages user-generated content,
you're gonna struggle to get entries.
It's going to be harder to get entries.
They have massive value, but you need to make sure
that you have a large or a highly engaged audience
before you run a contest like this.
Now let's look at the cons.
Number one is the rules. (image whooshes)
All social networks have rules
for running contests on their platforms.
And when you look at them, you might be surprised.
Things like asking for a like and share
as part of the entry mechanism is banned on Facebook.
Instagram forbids asking you to tag a friend
as part of the entry process.
But wait, what about all these competitions
that we see that clearly break these rules?
We're always seeing like-and-share competitions on Facebook.
We're always having to tag three friends
to enter a competition on Instagram.
What will actually happen if you break the rules?
The thing is, many people do get away with it.
But what can happen
is you could get hit with a reach penalty,
particularly if you're using the Facebook suite of tools.
And this means that for a period of time, often undefined,
Facebook will reduce the reach of your posts significantly
after you have broken the rule,
which kind of counteracts the benefit of the competition.
Or worst-case scenario, they could suspend your account
or completely delete your account.
Many people get away with it,
but it's totally up to you if you decide
to break the rules. (image whooshes)
Con number two is that contests can flop.
Yes, competitions can be a really good way
to build an audience, to build engagement,
to build reach, to get email addresses,
to do all sorts of things.
But there's no guarantee.
Some competitions,
particularly if you haven't planned them out
and you haven't amplified it and promoted it enough
can fail.
How would you reduce the risk of it failing?
Well, there's no guarantees,
but if you follow my eight-step process,
which I will share at the end of this video,
you're more likely to succeed and get the results you want.
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Con number three is irrelevant followers.
A social media contest can attract a lot of people.
But when you attract a lot of people,
some of those people are always going to be irrelevant.
Even worse, there are whole websites out there,
there are whole internet forums
devoted to social media contests
where people will post social media contests,
people will spend a big chunk of their day
entering as many as they can.
They'll even set up fake profiles so that they can increase
the number of entries that they get.
And all of those people
are very unlikely to be your customers.
Plus, fake profiles are gonna do nothing for your business
or your social media accounts,
except bad things. (image whooshes)
Con number four, it's not for free.
Social media contests can look like a quick and free way
to increase your social media performance.
But it's not free.
Even if you are lucky enough to get a prize donated,
you still have to spend a huge amount of time
creating the contest, planning the contest,
promoting the contest.
And that's time you could be spending on something else
that might deliver better business results.
And if you want to get the best possible results,
you should have a budget for social media ads
and maybe even to collaborate with creators.
Now you know the pros and cons
of running a contest on social media.
Let's look at my eight-step process
for creating a competition
that is most likely going to get you the results you desire.
(image whooshes) Step number one,
like any digital marketing strategy, is to set your goals.
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What do you want to achieve from your competition?
Do you want followers? Do you want reach?
Do you want engagement, email addresses?
What is it that you want?
And get specific about this.
Exactly how many new followers would mean success for you?
How much engagement,
are you improving your engagement rate?
How much are you improving your reach
by how many email addresses are you getting?
How much user-generated content has been achieved
as a result of your competition?
If this is your first time running a competition,
I'd recommend that you set scaled goals.
And here's a video on how you would do that.
Don't watch it yet.
Wait until this one's finished.
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Step number two is who.
Who do you want to attract with your competition?
Who are your ideal customers?
Once you know the answer to this, you can choose a prize
that is most likely to attract those people.
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Number three is where.
Which social networks
are you going to run your competition on?
And make sure you go and check the rules
about running competitions on that social network
so that you will know if you're breaking them.
(image whooshes) Number four is how.
How will people enter your competition?
Use your goals to find the competition style
that will get you the results that you want.
Also, how are you going to pick a winner?
How long is the competition going to run for?
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Step number five is the law.
Decide on the rules for people entering your competition
and post them somewhere
where it's easy for people to access and read.
(image whooshes) Step number six is to promote.
Put together a promotion plan
that should include developing your creative.
So that includes your images, your videos,
the texts that you're going to use
to promote your competition.
And make sure that you resize the images
and the videos for each social network
that you're going to post on.
And scheduling posts for social media,
if you're email marketing,
on blog posts and videos and other content on the internet
to drive people into your competition.
(image whooshes) Step seven is to measure.
And make sure you're measuring your goals consistently
through the duration of your contest.
Set up a spreadsheet or another document
where you can make a note of your statistics
on a regular basis
so that you can see what works and what doesn't work
and adjust your strategy depending on that.
(image whooshes) And the final step,
step number eight, is to review.
Now that your contest is finished,
have a look at your results.
Have a look at what worked, what didn't work.
What could you do better next time?
And you can use this information to make sure
that your next competition is even more successful.
Now we've looked at the pros and the cons,
and we've looked at the eight-step process
for setting up a competition.
You should have a better idea
if you should run a contest on social media.
Let me know what you decide.