How and Why to Use a Competition or Giveaway in Your Social Media Marketing

When done properly, you can use a giveaway to build a sense of community. This will maximize your increase in followers and fans and require you to keep engaging with your new followers.

Boost Brand Awareness

This is an excellent way to help people get more familiar with your brand. To increase awareness, ask people to tag their friends in your post. Giveaways are an excellent way to get people to notice your company.

Increase Engagement

Whatever campaign you are working on, there’s little doubt that giveaways help drive engagement with your brand. This gets people talking and commenting on your posts.

Gather Social Proof

Depending on how participants enter your giveaway, you can also use it to build social proof. For example, if you require them to post an image with your brand hashtag, you will get a wealth of user-generated content that may prove useful in future marketing efforts.

Promote Products

Another fantastic reason to participate in social media giveaways is to promote your new products or products that need to get some more traffic. This kind of promotion is an excellent way to generate more sales and increase leads.

Boost Sales

Because of the increase in followers, brand awareness, and engagement, you are almost guaranteed to see a boost in sales after a giveaway. An increase in revenue is the ultimate motivation for most giveaways, even if the stated goal is to get more leads or increase brand awareness.

How to Use a Giveaway With Social Media

Now that you have a better idea of why you should consider a giveaway on social media, how do you run one?

Decide on a Goal

Before starting any giveaway, you should understand what your objective is. For example, maybe you want to grow your email list. Giveaways are an excellent opportunity to grow this valuable resource. To participate, simply have everyone submit an email to be part of the contest. This will help you grow your list of potential clients to offer your promotions and discounts to.

Overall, some popular goals include:

• Increase followers
• Drive engagement
• Get more email signups
• Boost brand awareness
• Promote new products

Remember that you always want to pick a measurable goal, as this will let you confirm whether or not you reached it.

Choose a Platform

One of the first things to do is pick the appropriate social media platform to do your giveaway. It is best to use the one that has the strongest presence and the most engagement with its audience.

You should also remember not all social media platforms are the same. Depending on many variables, some platforms may be better for what you are doing. Once you have the social media platform in mind, you can move on to the next step.

Pick the Prize to Promote

 
The next thing you will need to do is decide what you will give away. Make sure what you are giving away is a quality prize that makes people want to win it. If it isn’t attractive enough, people won’t share it, and you will see a low engagement.

You want to make sure the prize is proportionate to what participants should do to win it. For instance, if you are looking for more followers, offering sample products may be a great way to get them involved. If you want them to use your brand hashtags, a bigger prize will need to be offered, as this will require more effort on their part.

Plan the Details

Now, it is time to plan out the details of your giveaway. The most important details to consider are the following:

• Timeline: When does it start, and when does it end? You will need to make the last day to participate clear in your announcements. 
• Posting schedule: Once you know the timeline, you can decide when and how often you will post about the giveaway to maximize participation. 
• Eligibility: Decide who can participate in the giveaway. Do the participants have to be a certain age or in a certain location? 
• Mode of participation: Decide how participants will participate, whether by sharing your post, using your hashtag, or another method. 
• Winners and announcement: Think about how many winners you will award and when you will announce the winners. 
• Prize: You already decided on the prize, but this is a good time to confirm that it will appeal to your audience. 
• Confirm the platform’s rules: Before finalizing anything, make sure your giveaway complies with the rules of the social media platform you will be hosting it on. 

Consider Using Tools

 
If you want to make it easier to track and run your giveaway, consider using one of the many available tools. Several tools even offer free plans with limited features or a limited timeframe, so this doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive.