Social Media Contests and Giveaways: How to increase brand awareness

14 April 2020

If you want to encourage your followers to share your social media publications and make them go viral, social media contests and giveaways are the answer.

With these two actions, you will get social media users to spread your content and to actively participate on your publications.

🚀 SOCIAL MEDIA CONTESTS 

A social media contest is a raffle of a present (either a product or service)  when users take the action you ask them to on your publication. 

It works as follows: upload a publication on Instagram or Facebook explaining that whoever leaves a comment with a heart, fills out a form or shares the post over the course of a week, will be entered into a sweepstake for a trip to Italy, for example.

When the raffle deadline is over, you draw and announce the winners. 

Social Media Contest Objectives

Social Media contests and giveaways can help you reach different goals. Here you can find the main ones: 

▶️ Enhance Engagement

If you ask participants to leave a comment, you will increase the engagement of your account.

▶️ Improve Awareness

Many companies ask users to comment on their publications with a mention to their friends instead of asking them to comment with a simple emoji. This is a great way to get your followers’ friends to learn about your brand.

▶️ Increase notoriety of your brand

Another action that is usually requested in social media contests is to share your publication. This is a way to reach more people with your publication and therefore, get more people to be aware of your brand.

CO-BRANDING SOCIAL MEDIA GIVEAWAYS

Co-branding is a popular practice amongst multiple companies for running social media giveaways. Two brands run a contest together to attract each others followers and therefore increase notoriety and awareness.

Probably you have seen on many influencer profiles: Comment the publication, follow the the account “x” and tag a friend. This is co branding.

Many influencers on Instagram opt for advertising the giveaway on their stories and then, announce the winners on a publication or their profile.

Ver esta publicación en Instagram

💖💖💖 SORTEO NAVIDEÑO CERRADO 💖💖💖 Súper sorteo de todos los productos de la colección de @mrwonderful_ #LauraEscanesxMrWonderful 🎁🎁🎁🎁 LOS 5 GANADORES SON @anitapicaixi @esthersc85 @laaura.tinoco @miiriiaamt @sheilamaar

Una publicación compartida de Laura Escanes (@lauraescanes) el

Ideas for social media contests 

Running contests on social media is a great strategy to promote your company, earn followers and improve the performance on Instagram.

However, what’s the best way to run a contest on social media?

We have gathered and put together some ideas from Instagram that you can adapt to your business needs. 

Idea #1 – Likes contest

This is a contest that we run for Metricool: 

Ver esta publicación en Instagram

¡DAME UN LIKE! ❤️ SORTEO: Si llegamos a 394 likes sortearemos una cuenta Premium de 3 meses entre los que le den like 🎁🚀 Vamos a aprovechar nuestros últimos días con likes visibles antes de que nuestro amigo @zuck nos los quite 🙋🏻‍♂️ . . LIKE ME! ❤️ GIVEAWAY: If we reach 394 likes we will giveaway a Premium account for 3 months 🎁🚀Let’s enjoy our last days with visible Likes before our friend @zuck takes them off 🙋🏻‍♂️ . . . . #marketing #marketingtips #marketingdigital #socialmediamanager #socialmediaplan #socialmediatools #socialmediamarketing #social #redessociales #rrss #feature #newfeature #socialmediatool #digitalmarketing #metricool #reports #instagramreports #socialmediareports #metricoolers

Una publicación compartida de Metricool (@metricool) el

With this example, we were raffling a 3-month premium account for Metricool amongst people who have liked that publication. 

Idea #2 – Share a publication on stories

Another popular idea during this year is to ask users to share a publication on their own stories. 

➡️ You can increase your engagement, awareness and followers.

Idea #3 – Increase followers

There are some contests that are focused on increasing the number of followers. In this case, the requirement to participate in the contest would be to become a follower of the account that organizes the giveaway. 

Idea #4 – Giveaways through hashtags

The company normally requests users to share the hashtag created for the social media content. 

What you can give away 

Usually, each company normally raffles one of their products or services. For instance, Metricool gives away premium accounts as a prize, while clothing stores offer jackets, accessories, etc. 

Even so, sometimes companies include other types of prizes to be more original, change it up a bit and attract users attention. 

Some example are:

🎁 Amazon gift cards, which allows winners to choose their prize.

🎁 A trip for two: Travel giveaways are very attractive. After all, who doesn’t like travelling? 

🎁 Gift packs: The more gifts included, the more people will be willing to participate.

Some tips for your social media contests and giveaways 

Be creative and original: On social media being different is a plus. When users like what they see, they will probably share it, like it or write a comment. The more original, the higher the impact.

✅ Pay attention to legal terms and conditions on social networks: Each social platform sets their own rules for running contests. Make sure that you read their terms first to avoid future problems. 

3 tools to run social media contests

You can run social media contests and giveaways manually. However, you can use the help of external tools that will ease the process and therefore, save your time.

TeleMakingWeb:With this app you can create different actions on Facebook: Promotions, contests, product catalogs…

Easypromo: It lets you run contests with photos and videos on main social media channels: Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. 

Do you want to learn more about social media marketing actions that will improve your strategy?

Sara Martín Sara Martín , 14 April 2020
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