Looking for social media contest ideas?
A Twitter contest is a great way to increase engagement, increase followers as well as increase product awareness. How many times have you seen businesses running a “RT to Win” or “Follow to Win” contest? Running a Twitter contest as part of your Twitter marketing can be really simple and clean and, without a doubt, Twitter is a great place for brands to run contests as businesses can easily engage and chat with their followers. theirs. However, before you start running any social media contest, make sure you read their social media contest rules and abide by their rules to keep your account safe. You should also think of some great social media contest ideas.
One way to differentiate yourself from your competitors is to run a different kind of contest. Your ‘RT to Win’ and ‘Follow to Win’ contests can lose their edge if your audience is seeing the same type of contests over and over again from different brands in their Twitter feed. Below are examples of different contest ideas that are worth trying:
1. Fastest correct answer
This is one of the fastest Twitter contests you can run, and it’s a powerful short-term contest. The key here is to build as much of the ad as you can before running it. It differs from other contests because most contests are built to create hype once it’s launched. Contest duration can also be used to seriously grab attention from your competitors as contestants need to be focused and on time to you to win the contest.
A good example is when you are hosting a webcast/webinar. You can entice listeners to stay tuned until the end of your webinar by letting them know that you’ll be giving away some freebies and they’ll find out how at the end of the webinar.
After your webinar is almost over, ask a simple Q&A and then ask listeners to use your hashtag to participate. Questions can be general questions in your niche or just questions related to your webinar.
Media friendly did something similar for their Top Twitter Accounts webinar. They gave a copy of Dave Kerpens book and the question was related to social media.
2. LOTTERY
Sweepstakes are one of the simplest contests that tend to work on any social network (and still work great with offline promotions). One way to take your sweepstakes to the next level is to use a Twitter app.
What can the app do? Not only will it create a branded contest on Twitter, but it can help you run a contest while building a list of target users. Binkd has a free Twitter contest app that lets you do just that. Before anyone can join, they will have to enter their email address and tweet your contest. This helps you build a list and increase the virality of the contest.
Using a Twitter app helps you work within a controlled environment and definitely helps you in terms of monitoring the competition.
3. Photo contest
A photo contest is a great idea to showcase your customers’ creativity as well as gain more awareness on Twitter. You can simply ask users to tweet a photo of themselves holding your product, food, and more.
It’s also a much more personal experience, and it’s a great way for your contestants to share it with other people. This increase in links and relevance helps increase the visibility of your competition and your product instantly.
Sunny Cosmetics is smart enough to give away coffee facial cleansers from their Etsy shop instead of iPads or iPhones to appeal to a relevant audience.
4. Caption contests
If you are looking for a fun contest, then a title contest will suit you. These types of contests are simple yet fun to host. You can simply write a blog post about the contest, include the photo, and ask users to post a caption about the contest, as well as include the hashtag so you can track their entries.
Here’s an example from The New Yorker:
Image source
5. Creative response
Earlier this year, in connection with the London 2012 Olympic Games, InnocentDrinks launched a creative response and won the Twitter competition called “tweet for a country”. Followers can win a pair of tickets to various Olympic events simply by tweeting to @InnocentDrinks who they would take to the Olympics and why.
While most of your Twitter contests need a hashtag, here are some simple, straightforward, yet powerful contests you can run using just hashtags.
a) Use the hashtag in the tweet
Ask people to use your hashtag in their tweets and you’ll randomly pick a winner. This makes people use your hashtag in ALL their tweets as they want to increase their chances of winning. Trust me, they will be tweeting all day long and the best part is that it doesn’t seem like a contest as they will include your hashtag in random, daily tweets.
b) Tweet hashtag + link.
This is a very clever idea. Recently @IdeaCellular launched a contest asking their followers to dedicate their song Honey Bunny to someone special and tell them why they are their honey bunny.
This led to people constantly sharing the contest and helping to increase the virality of the video.
With over 320,000 views on Youtube, I’d say this was a successful social media contest.
These are six simple Twitter contests you can start running today. Running a contest on Twitter can be a bit challenging because its simplicity tends to be a hindrance when it comes to running creative (and more complex) contests. I hope these examples have given you some good ideas. What about you? Have a Twitter contest you’d like to share? Any other social media contest ideas?
I love hearing your story.
Photo by Nicolas Hoizey on Unsplash
Social media contest ideas FAQ
There are many good contest ideas depending on your goal, brand voice, or even your location. The common type of contest/giveaway you might see on social media is for your audience to share a photo or submit a video and encourage their friends to like the post or leave some comments on it. The current post will serve as their entry to win the prize. This type of contest is the best way to increase your audience engagement. And you will see these contests mostly on Instagram, Facebook or Youtube.
To run a good social media contest, you need to ask yourself first, what are you going to achieve or look for after the contest? With this thought in your mind, you will have a guide on how to run the contest. However, one of the most critical things is to make sure that the contest you will run will not violate any Terms and Conditions of the social media platform you will be using.
Social media contests and giveaways are basically games and giveaways that are held virtually – especially through social media platforms. Therefore, all the activities or ways to win the contest are also done virtually. Some of the examples of social media contests are sharing a photo contest, submitting a video, referring a friend, etc.
Social media giveaways are made to help companies grow their brands, products and visibility. As their engagement and awareness increases, so do their sales. But to achieve these, you need to make sure that the social media giveaways you’re about to do actually convert. You need to set your goals and carefully choose the type of contest or giveaway that aligns with your marketing goals.
The best way to make a gift fun is to make it creative and engaging, but still in line with your brand image. You can try simple contests that will add value to your audience and brand. Don’t focus too much on what you can win from the contest, but on the relationship you can build with your followers.
