If you’re looking to improve your social marketing strategy, it is to your benefit to use social media contests and sweepstakes to build and connect to your audience. However, you will not be able to implement and run a successful social marketing campaign if your promotion is removed, blocked, or challenged in court. To help you run a successful campaign, below is a list of key strategies to improve your social media campaign.
Facebook Promotions Require an App: The Facebook Promotional Guidelines regarding running a compliant promotion has grown, but the critical guideline has not changed. This Guideline – any promotion such as a contest on Facebook must be run through an app. You can develop your own Facebook app or acquire an app from a company that makes them for promotions. Some are cheap with basic features while others are more involved with a variety of innovative features that personalizes the user’s experience. Using a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer will ensure your app is compliant with Facebook’s policies.
Disclose Rules for Twitter Promotions: You must provide users with terms and conditions of entry when holding any sweepstakes or contest. With only 140 characters, the easiest way to do this is to provide the rules on a separate web page and provide a link when tweeting about the contest. You could also host a landing page that states all of the contest details and direct traffic to that page. You can also use a third-party service like CMP.LY to keep in compliance.
Lotteries are the Domain of the Government: Since lotteries are the domain of the government, you have to make sure your promotion is not illegal. Lottery prizes are the following: prize, element of chance in winner selection, and consideration such as purchase requirement, cash payment, or there is effort needed to enter. You need to eliminate either chance or consideration to avoid legal problems.
Drive Traffic and Build Buzz: It is important to make it easy for users to share your promotion through their social graph. This can include using “Retweet to Win” or if you are using an app on Facebook to encourage viral sharing make sure you have easy sharing options but don’t over-share as it can be misinterpreted as spam. Directly rewarding a user for sharing is against Facebook policy. However, you may use Facebook apps to reward referrals.
Promote Contest Regularly: Maintain communication throughout the social media campaign. You can do this through sending key contest updates such as just reached 1000 entries, finalists being selected, etc. If you’re running a user-generated content promotion, you can increase user engagement by sharing content. When posting about your promotion on Facebook, use the pinned post feature to maintain your post’s visibility at the top of the timeline. Also, make sure you use all of your social channels to promote your contest.
Partner Marketing: Include sponsors and provide them with exposure in exchange for cross-promotion.
Identify influencers such as bloggers and journalists that you utilize to share news about your promotion. Attaching influencer names to your contest will add credibility.
User-Generated Content: When you ask users to submit content into a promotion, get them to send multiple submissions such as submissions from users who have been encouraged to enter early. It will encourage others to send in their own submissions.
Don’t Rely Only On Public Opinion: Incorporating public voting drives increased virality, however, if your contest is decided only by the public, you give control to others such as those with the biggest social networks and those who know tricks to change the system such as using vote swapping.
Panel of Judges: The most effective contests involve a round of voting to narrow entries to a preset number of finalists and then a panel of judges chooses the winners. Using influencers as judges adds credibility to a contest. This allows you to keep some control over who is named the winner while still generating a lot of voting and sharing. It is important that your platform can handle any voting challenges and your contests are both fun and rewarding for users.
