4 Quick Contest Tips to Kick-Start Your Social Marketing

We all have some level of competitive instinct in us. If you’ve never thought, “Hey, I could do that better,” you’re probably kidding yourself.  Competition is as much a part of our nature as eating or breathing – and sometimes we even get competitive with those!  So when you add in a prize and some social media exposure to combine incentive with instinct you can see why contests can be so effective for marketing.  Managing a successful contest, however, is no backyard pickup game. There’re a lot more than just getting people together and yelling “play ball!” Here are a few quick tips so you have your A-game when it’s time for your own contest.

1. Set Goals and Key Performance Indicators (KPIs): A contest isn’t just meant to get people talking. The jury may still be out on social media ROI, but for contests, given the resources necessary, there needs to be a measurable return. You need to know what you’re trying to achieve with the contest, and more importantly, how to measure it. Whether it’s likes, leads, or even direct revenue, define what success means, and the metric that best reflects it.

2. Seed the Field: The idea “if you build it, they will come” doesn’t apply to contests. A quick Google search of “Social Media Contest” will yield around 210 million results. Search “contest” on Twitter, and your news feed turns into a pin wheel. Clearly, contests are a noisy space, so if you want people to get involved you can’t rely on them finding you: you need to find them! Search out relevant social media groups, forums, or key influencers that are a natural fit with the objectives or details of your contest and put in some good promotional grunt work.

3.  For any Prize X Know the Why: The Lombardi Trophy itself is not why professional football players endure such grueling seasons year after year. They want everything the trophy means for their profession. Likewise, when trying to decide what prize will get your audience excited to compete, don’t assume a simple product will be an adequate selling point. Be sure to know why your audience wants to get involved before you can expect them to care how your contest works.

4.  Disclosure, Disclosure, Disclosure: Social media contests are a great way to create buzz and word of mouth advertising, but because the people who are talking about your brand or contest are doing so in hopes of winning a prize, their comments may qualify as endorsements and become subject to regulations by groups like the FTC. A good rule of thumb is to include terms & conditions or a quick disclosure on the contest page, so even if the contestants aren’t aware of their own need to disclose their intent, the link they share will keep them covered.

Seth Lieberman is CEO of SnapApp.  The SnapApp Marketing Platform that empowers brands and publishers to create social promotions and interactive content in order foster conversations across the web, social and mobile. With SnapApp companies can easily create engaging sweepstakes, quizzes, surveys and contests and use these to drive measurable results including registrations, downloads, likes, follows,+1s, shares, subscriptions, time on site and ad revenue.

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Glenn is a geographer and a GIS professional with over 20 years experience in the industry. He's the co-founder of GISuser and several other technology web publications.