6 Keys To Running A Successful Social Media Contest For Your Business

Why Social Media Contest?

When it comes to running a successful business social media contest, many business owners scratch their head and have no clues on where to begin. If you are new to business promotion and looking for a quick and inexpensive way to attract new customers, consider adding social media contest to your list of promotion tools.

Running a social media contest not only help with getting new customers to the door, but also one of the best ways to create brand awareness. With that in mind, we have decided to put together a few tips to building a successful social media contest for your restaurant.

Define your goals

Before you get started with any social media contest, it’s very important that you define your goals and know exactly what you’re trying to accomplish. Defining the goals for your contest is probably where you want to take some time and come up with specific, measurable, attainable, relevant goals which you’ll use to determine how successful the overall contest was. Therefore, as part of your goals definition, think of the following and incorporate them in your goals strategy.

How This Contest can boost my brand or help my product engagement?
How this contest will increasing your social following?
If you want to grow your e-mail list, how will this grow your email list?

Understand Your Audience

With a clear understanding of your target audience, it is much easier to determine where and how to run your social media contest. Here are some tips to help you define your target market.

Run a quick survey

If you have no ideas of what your audience or customers like about your business, send them a survey and ask. In the case of a restaurant, ask them while they are dining in.
Try to understand who your current customers are, and why do they come to your door? Look for common characteristics and interests. Which ones bring in the most business? It is very likely that other people like them could also like what you’re service.

KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid

Make sure your contest is short, simple, and on point because customers don’t like to wait or go through a lot of steps to get service. Therefore, ensure your Social media contests are long enough to generate ample entries, but short enough to keep customers engaged. Most successful contests will run anywhere from a few weeks to a month.

Choose your platform

Don’t just run your contests on any platform. Make sure to run it where you know your customers are to help you get the maximum exposure by liking and sharing it with their friends.

Know The Rules

Once you establish which social media platform you’ll use for the contests, make sure your understand their contest rules.
For example, Facebook discourages any contest that asks users to share a post or tag friends to win. So make sure you read and fully understand the rules for each social media platform you plan to use! Below are the link to the rules for some of the most used ones.

Promote and Engage

Now that you have a goal, your target audience, and the platform to run the contest, it’s time to get the ball rolling. Engage your current customers to get the words out and ask them to like and share. Don’t forget to leverage other social media platforms to promote your contests. For instance, If you are using Facebook to run the contest, you can generate more eyeballs by promoting it on Twitter and Instagram at the same time.