How to Create Social Media Content for Small Businesses
Boost your small business on social media: target audience, brand voice, platforms, strategy, and success. Dive in for expert tips today!
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:
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 examples, creative social media contests, and more to get you going.
Let’s get started…
How will you judge the success of your social media contest? It could be…
There are a ton of reasons you might want to run a giveaway contest. Start by defining the “success” metric so you can stay focused.
If you don’t know what you’re contest objective is, how will you know if it’s been successful?
When it comes to think about the real, tangible value success will bring to your company.
Psst. Want to know a secret?
…social media contests and giveaways often fail because their prizes suck:
Want your social media contest to smash your targets?
Find a prize (or prizes) that your niche is super excited about.
For example, here are some social media contest statistics that show just how powerful giveaway contests can be…
We were able to get 6,411 entries from a book giveaway that cost about $60!
Imagine if you had 6,411 engaged social followers on your Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook. That’s worth $60!
Why did this work? Simple:
What does YOUR audience like?Here are some prize ideas to get you started:
Sometimes, you can even get products for free!
To REALLY make your giveaway successful, 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 with their audience across social media.
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.
Once you have your prize (or prizes) in the bag, it’s time to get this show on the road…
“How do I actually set up a social media contest?”
You might think this is the hardest step. But, it’s actually really easy…
There’s a free social media contest platform called KingSumo to help you set up your giveaway in minutes.
When creating together your giveaway:
Here’s a great contest landing page example:
Pro tip: Keep 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 I’d say you want to be aiming 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.
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:
Pro tip: Check each social network for any guidelines on how you can promote giveaways on their channels. For example, “share to win” contests are no longer allowed by Facebook.
Ready to launch an awesome social media contest?
So there we have it, how to launch a social media contest in just 4 simple steps:
And before we leave, here’s one more bonus tip…
Once your social media contest or giveaway is over, announce the winners as soon as possible.
To make even the non-winners happy, the trick is to provide all entrants with something that makes them feel special. This could be:
For example, in one of our recent giveaways, everyone who entered received a bunch of discount codes just for entering — this way, no one leaves empty handed.
And it drove a TON of sales!
Ready to launch your own social media contest giveaway?
Take the steps outline in this giveaway, and use the free social media contest platform KingSumo to get started!