Running a social media contest is a great way to increase engagement, followers, leads, and brand awareness. But coming up with a strategy for your contest can be tricky.
You need to set the right goals, get creative, and make sure it fits your brand.
And then there’s the technical side of things, like arranging partnerships with influencers and making sure you follow each social network’s contest rules.
Don’t worry, we’ll have your back. In this post, we will give you creative social media contest ideas to get you started.
A social media contest is a social media campaign that encourages participation, followers, leads, or brand awareness in exchange for prizes and offers.
You can encourage your followers to like, comment and share your posts, and in return you can give them something they will appreciate. This not only helps increase your reach, but also gets more people talking about your brand.
Contests also encourage users to interact with your brand in a fun and creative way. For example, you can ask your followers to share their favorite photo of your product or come up with a creative post caption.
Your audience will get the opportunity to compete and win prizes, and you will reap the benefits of increased engagement. It’s a win-win!
If you want to get more likes, comments, and shares, try these fun social media contest ideas.
Like/share/comment to win
People like to win prizes, and for this they are ready to promote your brand. All you have to do is offer a prize that your target audience will be interested in and then ask them to like, share or comment on your post to enter.
To increase the reach of your contest, you can also partner with an influencer in your industry who has an audience similar to yours.
For example, if you represent a jewelry brand, you could team up with a fashion blogger and run a contest where your followers will win a piece of jewelry from your collection.
Or, if you’re a health food company, you can team up with a fitness brand to give away home gym products and healthy snacks, as Sunrype did below. Their joint contest has been shared over 3,000 times!
Creative video contests
Video content will activate your audience and engage them in your contest, as well as take them to a whole new level of creativity.
To run a video contest, you can ask your subscribers to submit a short clip related to your contest theme and then choose a winner based on creativity, originality, or any other criteria you choose.
While it might be easy to ask your followers to submit a video of how they use your product, why not get creative?
Goldfish Crackers became a huge hit on TikTok during their #GoForTheHandful Duet Challenge. As part of this fun social media contest, users were asked to hold as many Golden Fish crackers as possible. The one who breaks the record of 301 goldfish set by professional basketball player Boban Marjanović will receive the title of goldfish official.
Results, achievements? Over 30 million views on TikTok.
@goldfishsmiles #GoForTheHandful and try to beat Boban! #Contest begins 4/6. #ad See rules on challenge page.
User Content Photo Contests
Asking your audience to submit photos related to your brand is an easy and fun way to encourage participation. Plus, it gives you a ton of user-generated content (UGC) campaigns that you can use for future posts and social media campaigns.
For photo contests, you can ask people to:
- Submit a photo of yourself using your product
- Share a photo of them doing activities related to your campaign.
- Show how they creatively used your product
The Cooler Yeti brand recently teamed up with Traeger Grills for an Instagram photo contest. Participants were asked to post a photo of their barbecue, tag Yeti and Traeger, and use the #YETIxTraegerBBQ hashtag in their caption.
The hashtag generated over 1,000 unique social media posts that Yeti and Traeger used on their social media.
Use these creative social media contest ideas to get more followers.
tag a friend contests
Asking your followers to tag their friends in a post or comment is an easy way to increase your following with social media contests.
All you have to do is create a free post that invites your followers to tag a friend (or three friends) for a chance to participate. You can even offer bonus entries for every friend they tag.
Here’s an example from healthy eatery brand GoMacro, which asked followers to tag two friends for a chance to win free groceries. Their post had over 450 comments, which means almost 1,000 potential new followers!
Follow to win
Skip the chatter and get straight to the point – ask users to follow your social media page for a chance to win.
It is so simple!
Here’s an example of pop culture toy brand Funko that offered users the chance to win an exclusive Obi-Wan Kenobi™ toy in exchange for a subscription. Funko also offered a direct link to buy Amazon for users who didn’t want to wait for the contest to end.
Redraws
While getting a bunch of new followers through a social media contest looks good at the moment, it won’t make much difference if they unfollow you once the contest is over.
Once you get people following your account, you want to keep them there. This means that you need to offer them value beyond the competition itself.
A great way to do this is to regularly run social media contests. This can be a weekly or monthly draw where you give away a prize at regular intervals.
To sweeten the deal, you can offer different prizes each time, or even increase the value of a prize over time.
The Newfoundland and Labrador travel sector has successfully used this tactic in its #PlayItByEar campaign in partnership with Air Canada. The campaign included weekly prize draws for contestants who created songs using local sound bytes. They also included a grand prize draw at the end of the campaign to keep subscribers active throughout the campaign.
Social media contests can help you find more qualified leads and reach out to a wider audience. Here are three social media lead contest ideas to get you started.
Register for contests
You can use registration contests to collect information about your customers. To do this, simply ask contestants to register in exchange for a deal or offer.
This was the strategy the Columbus Blue Jackets used to increase ticket sales for their Stanley Cup playoff games. Facebook ads were sent to fans asking them to register to win free playoff tickets.
This campaign generated 2,571 leads and over $225,000 in ticket sales per game.
Source: Facebook
Direct Message Contests
If you want your audience to pay attention to your messages, try reaching out directly to their inbox.
Nail polish brand Sally Hansen used this tactic in their recent Facebook Messenger contest.
Users were sent direct messages with four questions about their skin tone, undertone and personal style. Based on the responses provided, Sally Hansen recommended a personalized set of color recommendations that contestants could interact with and explore further.
Those who shared their email addresses with Messenger were entered into a giveaway for a set of limited edition holiday red nail polishes.
This contest generated 11,000 new emails for Sally Hansen, not to mention an 85% email acceptance rate.
Source: Facebook
Direct landing page entries
Another way to get contest entries is to direct people from your social media to the contest landing page. This can be done with organic or promoted posts, or even a regular social media post.
Travel brand Expedia used this tactic in its #ThrowMeBack Twitter contest, which allowed contestants to go back on vacation from the past after signing up via a landing page.
Social media contests are a great way to tell your customers or target audience about your brand, product, or service. Not only that, they can also be used to increase brand awareness and generate new leads.
Here are three fun social media contest ideas you can use to build brand awareness for your business.
Joint competitions
Collaborating with another brand or influencer in your industry is a great way to reach new audiences and get people talking about your brand.
For example, you can team up with an influencer to give away one of your products to their followers. Or, you can partner with a qualifying brand to double your competition’s prize offerings.
Vancouver’s local restaurant chain Nuba took advantage of this technique when it partnered with yoga studio Jaybird. Both brands focus on nourishing the body and mind, so the competition was a perfect fit.
This contest got 7 times more likes than other similar noob posts.
Hashtag Issues
A hashtag challenge is a great way to get people excited about your brand. They are also very easy to set up as they usually rely on user-generated content. All you need is a catchy hashtag and some giveaways!
Challenging the Colgate #MakeMomSmile hashtag on TikTok brought great results. The contest encouraged users to share videos of how they make their mom smile. In just two weeks, the hashtag has racked up over 5.4 billion views and over 1.6 million user-generated videos!
Brand lens/AR contests
Platforms like Snapchat now offer branded augmented reality lenses and filters for users to play with. This provides a great opportunity for brands to have fun and run a competition using these features.
Oreo used this feature to create Oreoji-style lenses, filters, and stickers. Users can use these features in their daily shots or unlock the mountain zorbing game where they dodge obstacles while flying on a slippery slope. Players have won free packs of cookies as prizes.
This campaign helped Oreo connect with a younger audience and capture their attention with something new and exciting.
Once you have your contest template in place, it’s time to start planning your next social media contest. Whether you’re running a social media contest for your business, or just looking to expand your personal account reach, these tips will get you started.
1.Set goals and choose a platform
First of all, you need to set goals for the competition.
Do you want to increase engagement? Drive traffic to your site? Increase brand awareness?
Once you understand what you want to achieve, it will be easier for you to choose the right platform (or platforms) for your contest.
For example, if you want to increase engagement, Twitter or Instagram are good choices. If you’re looking to drive traffic to your website, a Facebook contest might be the best option.
2.Choose your prize
Next, you will need to choose your prize. Your prize must match the goals of your contest and your audience.
If you are trying to increase engagement, you can offer to promote them on your social media. If you want to increase brand awareness, you can offer a product sample or souvenir.
3.Advertise your contest in advance
It’s a good idea to create buzz around your competition before it launches. Make sure you give people enough time to enter the contest – you don’t want it to end before they even get a chance to enter!
You can promote your contest in advance:
- Post it on social media
- Sending emails to your subscribers
- Creating a landing page for your website
- Advertise the contest on relevant websites and blogs
Use Hootsuite to schedule social media posts ahead of time. This will help you ensure that you promote your contest across all of your channels and do so consistently.
4.Collaboration with an influencer (optional)
Teaming up with an influencer is a great way to get the word out about your contest. Be sure to choose an influencer whose target audience is similar to yours.
You can team up with an influencer:
- Ask them to share your contest on their social networks.
- Ask them to create original content for your contest (such as a blog post or social media post).
- Cooperation with them to receive prizes and / or conditions for participation in the competition
5.Follow network recommendations
Depending on the social network you use, there may be specific contest rules that you must follow. For example, Facebook wants to make it clear that your contest is not affiliated with their brand. Instagram requires you to have official rules for every contest.
Failure to comply with the network’s rules may result in your contest being withdrawn or not approved at all. So it’s definitely worth taking a look at it before launching your contest.
6.Choose the winners
Once your contest is over, it’s time to choose the winners! There are several ways to select winners fairly:
- Use an online tool like the Name Wheel to randomly select a winner.
- Choose the winner with the most tags
- Let the judge decide
Be sure to let your participants know in advance how you will choose the winner. This way there won’t be any surprises when the competition is over.
7.Track and optimize your competition
After the contest is over, it’s important to keep track of your results and see what worked and what didn’t. This will help you optimize future contests to be even more successful.
To track your competition, you need to follow: