Running an Effective Giveaway on Social Media

When it comes to connecting with your audience, few things beat social media giveaways and contests. Giveaways make the consumer excited about your brand and, when done correctly, encourage them to share and spread the word on their personal social channels. This creates an incredible opportunity to build your following, email list, brand visibility, and more.

In order to run an effective giveaway on social media, you need to start with a plan. Here we lay out a few key steps to follow when developing a contest on social media.

Define the Goal of the Giveaway

Before you begin promoting or designing content for the giveaway, it’s a good idea to know what you want to accomplish. Whether you are trying to generate traffic to your website, boost your number of followers on your social channels, or get more people to sign up for your email newsletter, having a goal in mind influences every aspect of the giveaway. Make sure your goals are specific, measurable, relevant, and attainable!

Here are a few possible objectives:

• Boosting brand or product engagement
• Growing your social following
• Increasing your email contact list
• Gaining user-generated content

Pick a Prize

A giveaway wouldn’t be complete without a prize to win. That being said, you do want to make sure to choose a prize that is related to your brand and relevant to the audience. Promoting your product is a great chance to get it in the hands of consumers who may have not otherwise purchased your product. Allowing them to “test drive” your product can eventually lead to them loving your brand and becoming a regular customer.

Prizes should also have significant enough value to motivate your audience to participate. The more valuable the contest prize, the more participation and participants you’ll get. Partnering with other brands to give away products alongside yours can bring much more value to your giveaway and generate more interest from consumers.

Partner with Relevant Brands/Influencers

If you want to add reach to your giveaway, try partnering with brands whose audience you’d like to access. That way, when these brands promote the sweepstakes to their email list or social channels, you can market to anyone who enters to win, delivering your message to thousands of inboxes or social media users. This opens the doors to a like-minded audience that already has an interest in your industry and, therefore, is more likely to convert into customers.

Choose a Social Platform

To ensure a successful contest, your brand should take advantage of several social media platforms. It’s a great way to open up the sweepstakes to people who might be on Instagram and Twitter, but might not be on Facebook (or the other way around). Across these platforms users can like and share your post, tag their friends in the comments, and use a branded hashtag. You can even encourage user-generated content by having your audience post photos with the product to enter on Instagram and Facebook. Hosting a giveaway across several social media channels gives you access to a larger audience and in turn, increased brand visibility.

Another important tip is to promote your sweepstakes where followers are most likely to engage. Then, give your audience additional entries to your contest for each of your social networks they visit. In doing this, you can increase page visits, followers, and reach across all platforms.

Support giveaway via email

One way to support the giveaway is by sending a giveaway announcement to your already existing email list. Continue to stay in touch with them throughout the contest by sending reminders, welcome messages, and winner announcements. Your email contacts are already interested in your business, so an online contest is a perfect way to reward their interest and support.

Promote giveaway on stories to remind followers

Get your followers excited about your giveaway on a regular basis by posting stories on Instagram and Facebook! To capture your audience's attention, post stories that show the rarity or exclusivity of the prizes you’re offering. You can use these stories to break down the contest to viewers to help them fully understand the premise of your giveaway: the prizes, requirements for entry, and terms and conditions. If viewers have any questions or concerns about the contest, they have the option to comment directly through your stories. Stories are a great chance to engage with your audience, keep them up to date with contest announcements, and get them excited about the brand.

Pick a theme

If you’re launching a new product or service, you can plan exciting and engaging giveaways to start trending conversations around your product before its official launch. Contests help build hype around your product while also giving you the chance to educate audiences on product features and benefits. Giveaways are a creative way to get your audience familiar with the product before it’s on the market.

You can also plan giveaways for an upcoming holiday, current season or popular trend in order to drive traffic and boost sales. Themed giveaways drum up excitement from consumers and gives brands the opportunity to spice up their marketing calendars.

Choose the right program

To save time planning and help organize your sweepstakes, try using platforms such as DojoMojo, Woobox and Wyng. These sites help you connect with brands for partnerships, develop landing pages, and measure campaign results.

Analyze the Results

Access to analytics allows you to see how your campaign performed and help you understand which partnerships resonated well with your audience. You can take this data and knowledge with you when you plan your next giveaway. Giveaways are all about relationship-building, whether its with an audience, like-minded brands, or both. The results will show which brands you’ll want to work with again in the future.