‘Competition should not be for a share of the market – but to expand the market’

(Posted on 08/02/24)

We recently did a social media competition for our client, Wrexham-based Ace Play, the indoor and outdoor playground equipment specialists. It’s the second competition after the success of the first one we ran, which had a reach of twenty-five thousand on Facebook.

Alongside regular blogs, social media posts and website updates, competitions are a good way to increase engagement with your brand. They are a great way to gain more followers, increase your reach, target consumers and boost brand awareness.

Here are some top tips to running a successful social media competition.

1 - Target who you want to enter

Competitions create the opportunity to raise brand awareness amongst your target audience. Our client’s audience is schools, nurseries, early learning centres, community projects and parks. For this client, Facebook was the most popular platform. Have a clear idea of what your end goal is: are you trying to increase brand awareness? Are you trying to increase your engagement? Do you want to drive traffic to your website? Ensure you target the post at your target audience to maximise your return by attracting genuine potential customers.

2 - Relevant and eye-catching prize

It’s important to ensure the prize is relevant and worthy for people to take the time to enter. It’s also good if it targets the audience you want to encourage to follow your page. For its latest competition, Ace Play offered an outdoor shelter worth an impressive £5000, an amazing win for most schools, nurseries and community projects.

Ensure you use bold and clear images of the prize to entice entries. Having more than one winner is also a good idea, asif people entering think there is more than one chance of winning, they’re much more likely to enter.

3 - Clearly state the rules and how to enter

Always be clear from the beginning what constitutes an entry to the competition. It’s important you have clear and precise terms and conditions set out on the post with an end date too. Ensure you are up to date on Facebook’s competition rules too.

4 - Like, comment, and follow

The most popular and the simplest way to boost your followers is the like, comment and follow competition message. This ensures everybody who enters follows your page and increases numbers. It’s also encourages others to share on their social media and helps spread the word about your competition.

5 – Promote your competition

Make sure you leverage your other marketing channels to ensure you have tried everything possible to increase the competitions reach. If it’s a Facebook competition, talk about it on your other social pages. Tag companies into your posts who you would like to target to enter. Be sure to trail the competition with regular posts, including a countdown to the closing date

6 - How to pick a winner and announce

The final day of the competition has arrived and it’s time to update your post to let those taking part know the competition has finished. Here at Zebra, we have our own technique for efficiently collating the competition entries and we use an online automated picker programme to ensure a winner is selected in the fairest way. It’s a good idea to post about the winner for the benefit of future competitions, if people see the winner, it boosts trust and helps to visualise winning in the future.

Do you need to boost your followers on social media? Perhaps you would like to promote your brand. Talk to us to find out how we can help you Get in touch with the Zebra team today .