Social media contest is one of the most effective tools for enhancing your business. If you know how to use it effectively then you can really make more profit.
But how does a social media contest help your business? Let us take an example of email subscribers. I think I don’t have to tell you the importance of email list for your business.
Social media contest can help you in generating quality leads through collecting emails of the visitors. You can grow your email list by creating social media contests every week or month on Facebook, Twitter etc.
In this article, we look at 6 effective ways of using social media contests for generating quality email subscribers.
Organize a Contest that Suits Your Brand and Followers’ Behavior
The objective of any social media contest is to generate leads, engage followers, increase followers and collect as much as personal data like email, phone number etc.
Hence to achieve all the above objectives it is necessary that the contest you are organizing must be very relevant to your brand or the business.
Moreover, the contest must be in accordance with the behavior of your followers. For example, if your business is selling apparels (or any grocery items) then you have to design a contest that allows your followers to win free T-Shirts or Trousers.
Your followers which are taking part in the contest need to vote on which product they would like to buy more often. Once they vote, they enter the contest and in the end you choose a winner.
Design a contest that relates to your business and also understands the behavior of your followers.
Choose a Relevant Prize, Not Generic
We need to talk more about the type of prize you are going to choose. Not just the type but also how many are they. Let us be clear, people take part in a contest only because there is a prize or some other benefit.
So you must be smart enough to choose a right kind of product.
For example, if your business is about selling clothing and other accessories then your prize must be like a T-Shirt or a Sunglass or Shoes. However, if you are offering iPhone or iPad as a prize then you are doing a disservice to your business and brand.
Because it is an iPhone people may get attracted to it and you will get a lot of entries but this will not promote your clothing brand simply because the prize and your business are unrelated.
Moreover, it is better to choose multiple prizes over one prize while designing a contest.
Make the Contest More Winnable
In order to use the contest more effectively, you have to make it more winnable in other words very easy to win. In fact, the main objective of creating a contest is to get as many as email leads and not testing the IQ of your followers.
In order to make your contest easier, you can do various things like offering multiple prizes and creating rounds smartly. We talked about multiple prizes in previous paragraph. Here I would add that it is better to give multiple smaller value prizes over one high-value prize.
Next is separating entry and voting rounds. This helps to create a level playing field so the contestants can feel that they have an equal opportunity winning the contest. For example, open your contest for voting only after you have stopped accepting submissions.
Moreover, don’t let voting decide the winner. You must also add a jury for the sake of fairness.
Incentivize Voting and Sharing
For generating email leads it is equally important to capture the voter leads. You are leaving money on the table if you are only capturing the email leads of the entrants and not of the voters.
Hence to capture the voters’ lead you have to add another layer to your contest where you ask them to get register with their emails and in return, you offer them a chance to win a prize.
In simpler words, you have to engage voters by giving them a chance to win a prize from the contest.
Contest Should be Like an Ongoing Event
In order to engage with your followers on a regular basis, it is necessary to make your contest an ongoing event like it never ends. The contest must allow your fans to enter multiple times rather just one.
If the participants see the chances of winning the contest are great then they will keep coming back for more and more. Your contest can also use a point system to lure your fans to enter it.
Right Contest Designing and Promotion Strategy
Finally, you have to choose right promotion strategy. What type of software are you using to create a contest? The contest that you design must be very simple to join for all your fans.
An ideal contest system must ensure that sharing the contest is a very simple process by your contestants. To cut it short a contest must be simpler to understand, easier to participate, fun to engage and rewarding to share.
So choose right software and designing process for a contest. If you follow these tips then you will surely generate more email leads for your business.
This article is contributed by Pritam Nagrale who is a blogger from Mumbai. He writes about making money ideas & blogging tips on MoneyConnexion. Apart from blogging, he provides classroom training for internet marketing at his Mumbai office.
