How to...run a successful giveaway on social media
A lot of brands run competitions on social media to drum up engagement within their follower base. However, many smaller brands might worry that running a competition won't get many entries, and thus they might 'embarrass' themselves online.
Here, we're briefly explaining the in's and out's of running a competition on social media. Why you should do it, how it benefits you and the different options for running a successful competition!
Benefits of running a giveaway:
1. Boost Brand Awareness
If you're looking to boost your brand awareness this is a simple, free activity to do. By hosting a competition you're likely to see your engagement spike, and the post is also likely to appear on others feeds, particularly on Facebook, and on Instagram in the discover tab.
2. Easy Way to Boost Following
It's harder than ever these days to boost your following - especially on Instagram. Holding a giveaway is a brilliant way to give your followers the boost you've been looking for. All you need to do here is partner with another brand/influencer and do a reciprocal giveaway e.g. you giveaway their product and at the same time they giveaway your product with the overall goal of boosting eachother's following. Here, you'll want to partner with a brand who is in the same industry as you e.g. health foods as you're likely to have a similar follower base.
Top tips and how to do it:
The greatest tip for a successful giveaway is:
Make it easy for your followers.
Don't ask your followers to take any kind of picture of your product, or 'share' the post. Taking a picture of your product only really works when the overall goal is to get new content for your channel - and even then you probably won't get much interest (unless you're a massive brand with millions of followers) and the content isn't likely to be high enough quality. Don't ask people to share the picture because let's face it - people are lazy, they're precious about their Insta-feed and it's embarrassing to be seen entering a competition on social media.
How to run a competition:
1. pick your channel: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook - don't pick more than one. This is when it gets confusing and your followers on Facebook will wonder why you didn't pick a winner if you've already chosen a winner on Instagram, and vice versa.
2. Partner with another brand/influencer and do a return giveaway - easy way to boost your following by offering a 'high value' physical gift. People LOVE free stuff (trust me on this one) so the more opportunity you give them to win something physical the better.
3. Take a suitable image for your competition which clearly shows the prize (for obvious reasons)
4. Write your caption and pick your terms - for this you'll want to start the caption by writing "GIVEAWAY" in bold so it catches people's eye. Then you'll need to pick the terms of your competition. As an example, we're going to pretend we're doing a giveaway for a health food brand. We would recommend that you ask people to 1. Follow us and @xxxx (the brand you've partnered with - you can leave the second part out if you haven't partnered with anyone). 2. Ask your followers to tag a friend below (in the case of a healthy snack brand we would write tag your snacking buddy below) and then 3. Ask them to like the post so it appears in more people's feeds/timeline.
Following these parameters will ensure you get maximum engagement, brand awareness and likes!
5. Post on your story that you're doing a giveaway on your page - and point people to the post by taking a screenshot of your profile and drawing an arrow (or whatever your personal style is)
By following these steps, you should now have all the info you need to run a successful social media competition. Let us know how it goes by tagging us on social media! @sassydigital