Hosting a social media contest may be your company’s most successful growth hack! So many brands are jumping into the tactic but it doesn’t seem to get old!
Here’s the collection of most useful resources to help you host a successful social media contest:
Designing Your Social Media Contest
There’s a huge number of tools helping you to host a social media contest. I’ll list the one I tried but check this list for more (Most of them will provide similar options, so try a few before deciding which one you are more comfortable with).
Heyo is a very easy-to-use tool with lots of built-in templates for your inspiration. It offers a ton of options including giveaways, photo and video contests, refer-a-friend and many more.
Monitoring Your Social Media Contest
If you use Heyo of an alternative tool, you’ll have some analytics tools at hand. Depending on the social media platform(s) you are hosting and promoting your social media contest at, you’ll also have native analytics apps. But here are a few third-party platforms you’ll need to track and engage more users:
Yotpo Instagram Curation Tools
There aren’t many Instagram tools out there yet, so I am always happy when a new one pops up. Yotpo has just launched their Instagram curation tool which you’ll find invaluable to curate participants’ photos and to engage with your community.
Yotpo lets you search Instagram efficiently (using any number of search terms within one search) and easily engage with many photos in bulk thanking them for the contest submission or asking to republish their contest entry to your own content properties. This tool makes an Instagram contest so much easier!
You can then use Yotpo widget to publicize your curated Instagram updates to your product pages for them to serve as product reviews
Twitter Hashtag Tracking: Keyhole
If you are holding your contest on Twitter via a hashtag, Keyhole is your best bet for recording and analyzing the data. I love their user analysis letting you see the most influential Twitter users participating in your contest: These are your influencers to interact with and push more engagement and awareness!
Rules and TOS for Your Social Media Contest
There are laws for sweepstakes, lotteries and contests. There are also terms of service for promotional event at each social media platform. Be very well-prepared to avoid a disaster!
- Social Media Promotions and the Law: Use these guidelines to understand how the law could impact your activities. The guide is mostly about the US law.
- How do I run a contest or sweepstakes on a Facebook Page? You can require to like a page update to enter your contest but you cannot require to share anything on a user’s personal stream. There are more promotional guidelines to keep in mind.
- Pinterest contest rules: You cannot require that the participants should pin your contest rules to their boards. You cannot require participants to Pin a specific image.
- Guidelines for Promotions on Twitter Don’t encourage posting the same Tweet repeatedly. Don’t use an irrelevant hashtag to curate your contest.
Dates to Hold Your Social Media Contest
You want your contest to be timely for the best results: Here are some resources to pick the best date to plan your event!
- Public holidays by country
- Holidays observed worldwide
- Fun and weird holidays for viral contest inspiration!
Inspiration for Your Social Media Contest
BuzzSumo has a great Premium feature allowing you to search Facebook and filter results to “giveaways”. Just type in a word and see what others have been doing and how successful they have turned out to be:
Are there any social media contest resource or tool that belongs here? Let me know in the comments!
One Response
What a good set of links to rules and laws about running a contest. I researched this topic a few years ago and found there were suggestions of underwriting, hiring an attorney and more. I am glad I read this article. Valuable resource.
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