How To Create a Viral Social Media Contest or Giveaway

Are you looking for an effective, quick, inexpensive way to grow your business?

A social media contest or giveaway could be the perfect solution for you. Here’s why a giveaway can help:

• Grow your social media following. Get more Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter followers… automatically!
• Increase your email list. More email list subscribers means more potential customers for your product
• Drive more revenue. Get more eyeballs on your products, websites, or services!

And much more…

Don’t just take our word for it, though. Recently, we generated 6,144 emails subscribers with one simple giveaway:

Often, the hesitation for social media influencers and business owners is simple:

‍“How do I actually run a social media contest or giveaway?”

‍We’re here to help.

‍In this post, you’ll learn 4 steps to run a successful social media contest or giveaway.

‍Plus, we’ll share social media contest ideas examples of creative social media contests, and more to help you build brand awareness across your social platforms.

So, let’s get started.

4 steps to a successful social media contest

While there’s no clear-cut process for launching a great contest, we’ve captured the essence in the four steps below. Be sure to read all the way to the end because we’ve included everything you need to set yourself up for success.

1. Set an objective

How will you judge the success of your social media giveaway or contest? You could base it on many factors, such as:

• New followers across all social media channels
• Number of contest entries
• New product sales
• Increase in social media engagement
• More email subscribers, i.e., conversions
• New customers

There are a ton of reasons you might want to run a giveaway or contest. Regardless of whether it’s an Instagram contest or a Facebook contest, start by defining the “success” metric for your social media campaign so you can stay focused.

Because ultimately, if you don’t know what you’re contest objective is—whether that’s to build more brand loyalty or drive traffic to your website— how will you know if it’s successful?

‍Think about the real, tangible a value successful contest will bring to your company. And create your contest rules around that.

2. Choose a prize that rocks

Psst. Want to know a secret?

Social media contests and giveaways often fail because their prizes suck:

• They’re too generic (“win a gift card!”)
• They don’t excite the audience (“get this FREE lame little pin!”)
• No one cares enough to enter (“here’s this tiny thing you don’t care about!”)

Want your social media contest to smash your targets?

Find a prize (or prizes) that your target audience is super excited about.

For example, here are some social media contest statistics that show just how powerful giveaway contests can be:

For years, 30% of AppSumo’s revenue came from giveaways. That’s how we bootstrapped our way to becoming an 8-figure company. And out of all our early marketing strategies, giveaways delivered the best ROI.

In fact, we got 6,411 entries from a book giveaway that cost about $60!

Why did this work? Simple:

1. Our audience is interested in business and marketing
2. Seth Godin’s books are incredibly well resected in this niche
3. Entrants know these books (the prize) will help them toward their goals

What does YOUR audience like?Here are some prize ideas to get you started:

• Product from your business or niche
• Consulting call (you can share your tips on something you’re good at)
• Books that your followers would like

Sometimes, you can even get products for free!

To REALLY make your giveaway successful, try to build partnerships. Partners can help by providing prizes and promoting your giveaway.

If you promise to tag them or mention them in your promotion, sometimes they’ll reciprocate by emailing their list and sharing the contest across their social platforms to boost engagement.

To get started, come up with a list of 10-15 potential partners and drop them an email about getting involved.

Here’s an example from Julien Marion who used giveaways to grow an email list:

Often, the most successful social media contests have prizes that appeal to the lifestyle and passions of your audience in creative ways.

Once you have your prize (or prizes) in the bag, it’s time to get this show on the road.

3. Set up your contest

We covered the foundation, and now you might be wondering: “How do I actually set up a social media contest?”

This might seem like the hardest step, but it’s actually really easy.

There’s a free social media contest platform called KingSumo which can help you set up your giveaway in just minutes. It helps you grow your audience and reward brand engagement with customizable viral contests. And guess what? You can embed these contests almost anywhere. Plus, KingSumo makes it super easy to gather and organize your leads’ emails with its intuitive system and API integrations. In other words, it does the heavy lifting for you.

And when creating your giveaway:

1. Give it a short, snappy title headline
2. Create some high-quality images/visuals to showcase the prize(s)
3. Write a solid description (in a fun way) to help people understand why they want to win

Here’s a great contest landing page example:

Pro tip: Make your giveaway contest length short — don’t keep your entrants waiting to know if they’ve won.‍

This is SUPER important and overlooked by many giveaways.

There’s no magic contest length, but if you ask us, we’d say you want to aim for anything between 1-2 weeks to give you time to promote your contest and get enough entries in.

You could even experiment with “flash” giveaways lasting just a day or two.

Anything longer, and people lose interest or forget.

4. Promote your contest

Now you’re ready to go. Your contest is all set up, but how will you get entries?

Here are a few ways to promote your contest:

1. Offer bonus entries for social shares: This is an awesome way to boost entrants and it’s even baked right into KingSumo, making it super easy to reward people who tag a friend in the comments section or share your contest with more chances to win.This is also how you grow your social media following! Give bonus entries if people follow you on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter.

1. Message your lists: If you already have an email list, a Slack community, or even a bunch of subscribers on Facebook Messenger, send a message out about your contest. Here’s an example message promoting a contest:

1. Promote on social media: Your followers are highly likely to be interested in your giveaway, so sharing it on your social channels is a no-brainer. But if you want to reach new audiences, try sharing in Facebook Groups, using new hashtags on Twitter and Instagram, or even finding relevant subreddits to post. Focus on meeting your audience where they spend most of their time. For instance, if you’re running a video contest targeting Gen Z, you want to make sure you’re spreading the news on TikTok—one of the fastest-growing social media platforms out there. Similarly, if you’re looking to reach millennials or Gen X, you might want to promote it on Facebook (based on their digital habits). And always make your posts relevant to each audience, just like Sam Jeffries:

Pro tip: Check each social network for any guidelines on how you can promote giveaways on their channels. For example, Facebook no longer allows “share to win” contests. And LinkedIn’s professional community guidelines forbid “lotteries, contests, sweepstakes, or giveaways.”

‍Ready to launch an awesome social media contest?

There you have it, in just 4 simple steps:

1. Set an objective
2. Choose prize(s)
3. Set up your contest
4. Promote your contest

And before we leave, here’s one more bonus tip…

BONUS: Ensure everyone’s a winner

Once your contest or giveaway is over, announce the giveaway winners or contest winners as soon as possible in a social media post.

And the trick to making even the non-winners happy is to provide all entrants with something that makes them feel special. This could be:

• Free download (content upgrade, eBook, or more)
• Discount code
• The chance to be entered into the next giveaway for free

For example, in one of our recent giveaways, everyone who entered received a bunch of discount codes just for participating—this way, no one leaves empty-handed.

And it drove a TON of sales!

Ready to launch your own social media contest or giveaway?

Use the free social media contest platform KingSumo to set yourself up for success!