The Startacus Guide to social media competitions

by Startacus Admin

The Startacus Guide to social media competitions...

Some other things that you should consider are;

• Use as many social media platforms as possible -  Don’t just restrict yourself to the ones that you are most comfortable with or have the greatest following on. If there is a particular network that you have not been using to its full potential, this can be a great opportunity to expand your following - just make sure you are suitably familiar with the site and how it works first.

• Alter your competition so that it fits in well with the social media site you are using. For example, image based competitions work well on Facebook and Pinterest, but not so well on Twitter.

• Facebook now has ironclad rules about competitions being run on the site. You must use a compliant competition app such Wildfire, Franappz or Virtue in order to administer your competition.  

• Engage with your audience during the competition, make sure that they know their responses are being registered and not just filtering their way into some forgotten database. This can also be a great opportunity for you to further increase their awareness of what you actually do.

• Make sure that all competition related info provides a link to your site and some interesting information about who you are and what you do.

• Don’t over-do it. There is a very fine line between acceptable self promotion and downright spamming. Make sure that you are sharing your competition enough to get it noticed but not so much that people get sick of seeing it.   t can also be a good idea to change the wording, layout and presentation of your posts every so often to keep it looking fresh.

• If you are using Twitter, make sure that you use hashtags effectively to maximize the exposure of your competition to relevant users.

• Make sure you follow all rules and regulations to the letter. You need only search “social media competition disasters” to see why this is absolutely essential. If not you could very quickly find yourself at the wrong end of a nasty lawsuit. Remember to consider misrepresentation, data protection and false advertising.

• Make your competition as transparent as possible - let the entrants know how winners will be selected and that each person has as much chance as anyone else. If people can see how the process works they will be more likely to enter.

So there you have it, hopefully a useful (if a bit rambling) guide to social media competitions. As always, this is not a definitive list, nor do we claim to be social media gurus...because we really ain't...these are just a few of the things that we think it would be good to think about when running a social media competition.

If you love social media as much as we do you might want to take a little nosy at some of these few recent articles.

• UsingVine for business

• Pinterest - A few Pinteresting developments

• Using Facebook Hashtags for Business

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Published on: 5th November 2013