How to Use Social Media Competitions to Grow Your Audience and Increase Engagement

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST"Like and share" competitions are against Facebook Terms and Conditions! You cannot ask users to share your content during your competition. However, you can ask them to like your content."Tag a friend" competitions are popular and currently legal according to social media Terms and Conditions. These competitions give you double the exposure!The effort each user must put forth needs to be worth the prize they will receive.Put your followers first. Give them what they want, not what you want to give away.You MUST have terms and conditions with your competitions. It isn’t worth the risk not to have them.Market your competition to your email list, post it on your other social media accounts and advertise in all other outlets to maximize your exposure.After you choose a winner, consider offering a discount for your products or services to those who were not chosen. Have the individuals that are interested send you a private message for the code!THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…No matter how many followers you have or the size of your social media presence, competitions will benefit you! You can leverage your current social media presence by running a competition that increases views and engagement.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSWhat competitions to run and which ones to leave alone - 02:42Things to think about when running competitions on social media - 06:53How to maximize your social media competitions - 12:02Transcript below Hello, and a really warm welcome. Thank you so much for joining me on episode 12 of the Social Media Marketing Made Simple podcast, and I am your host, Teresa Heath-Wareing. I hope you are well and have had a great day so far. Although if you're like me, you might listen to your podcast first thing in the morning. That's when I tend to listen to my podcasts or my audiobooks. When I'm getting ready, it sits in my bathroom with me, and the hour it takes me to put my makeup on and sort myself out is the time that I listen to them. You may have just woken up, and if you have, good morning.As usual, I am really excited about today's episode and the subject of it, because I think that today's episode is something that every business can benefit from, and they can use. No matter what you sell, whether it's a product or a service, how big your business is or how many followers you might have, I think today's subject will apply to everyone.On today's episode, we're going to be looking at how you can use competitions on social media to grow your audience and to increase engagement. I love competitions on social media. They go together so, so well, and as I've said, no matter what size your business is, what product or service your business sells, or how many followers you might have on social media, I know that if you do a competition tomorrow, it's not only going to help to improve your social media, but also your business.In the agency we run, we have had lots of experience of competitions and done lots of different ones for lots of different types of clients. That's why I am so confident that you can see great results, regardless of your business. Today I'm going to be talking you through some key areas that are going to make your competition successful. Firstly, I'm going to be sharing with you some ideas around what type of competitions you can do, what competitions work well on what platforms, and what competitions you absolutely shouldn't do because they're against terms and conditions.Then we're going to have a look at some of the key points that you need to consider if you're going to be running a competition.And how you can maximise that competition, make sure that you get the biggest and the best results. And these results can include things like brand awareness, gain followers, increasing in engagement, the potential for huge reach, and ultimately some sales. So let's get started. What competitions to run and which ones to leave alone The first thing we're going to look at is the types of competitions that you can actually do. One of the first things you need to think about is which platform do you want to run your competition on, because not every platform is going to be suitable for every competition, and some competitions work better on some platforms than others. I'm going to run through some of my favourites, some of the ones that I like to do.Now one of the most simplest competitions that you have probably seen a million times over is a like and share competition, and most often you will see these on Facebook. Now the first thing I need to kick off and say is that like and share competitions are against Facebook's terms and conditions, and it drives me crazy. Every time I see one, I am tempted just for a millisecond, to contact them and go you know you're not meant to be doing these. But for lots of various reasons, I don't.Anyway, it's not the like bit that is against their terms and conditions. It's the share bit. By all means, running like competitions can be great for your page and for getting exposure, but you can ask them to share that post in order to enter the competition. But like I said, like competitions can be really good and they're simple to set up and they're quick and easy, and also people are very used to them on social media. The chances are if you do do a like competition, and you stick by their terms and conditions, you don't mention the word share, lots of people are going to share your post anyway, and you are going to reach more people. That's one of the most simplest ones you can do.If you are in Twitter, you can do a retweet competition. That's okay. That's not against their terms and conditions, so you can ask people to retweet a post in order to enter the competition, and again, Instagram, follow the page, Twitter, follow our profile, so you can encourage people to follow your accounts by running a like competition.The thing you have to bear in mind, though, is that lots of people enter lots of competitions, and therefore you might get people liking your page just because they want to win a prize. The good thing about a like competition is that the prize doesn't have to be massive. You're asking a very low engagement from them, literally just liking a page takes no effort at all, and therefore you can get away with giving them something very small in return.The other thing that is really popular and it currently is okay to do ... personally, I think that Facebook might change their view on this ... but one of the competitions that is really good to do is tag a friend. An example of this might be it's running up to Mother's Day and you might do something where you're giving away a gift, but you say to the entrants take your mom who deserves this thing. Or another idea might be tag a loved one when it's running up to Valentine's Day.The benefits in using a tag a friend competition is that the ability to grow that competition doubles every single time someone enters, because not only are they entering, they're tagging someone else in, which is doubling the amount of people seeing it every single time. So they can be really effective in terms of reach and exposure.If you want people to go to a little bit more effort, using a photo competition would be great. These can be super effective on Instagram, as you would imagine, and the way you would do it is you would either ask them to include a hashtag that you've created for that competition or to tag you in. You could also have them do both. Some of the examples for Instagram competitions would be purchase one of our products and take a photo of yourself with it. Or you could ask people to take a photo of them doing something in particular, take a photo of their pet, take a photo of their favourite place. The options are endless, and the more creative the better. And I guess it goes without saying that if it can relate to the business and what you sell or the product or the service you offer, then great.There are obviously loads of other competition ideas out there, and if you literally just google competition ideas for social media, then you're going to find loads of them. But I wanted to give you a couple of ideas. Things to think about when running competitions on social media Now, the next part of this podcast is going to be talking about some of the things that you need to think about if you're going to be running competitions on social media. My first thing is, the effort that someone has to go to has to be worth the prize. If you want someone to go to a lot of effort, i.e., on a photo competition or hand over their email address, then you've got to give them a prize worth having. If you want someone to do a like competition, then you can get away with giving them a smaller prize.But let's, for instance, you sell gin, and you wanted to run a competition. If I was doing a like competition, then I would probably give away a bottle of gin to one person who liked the page. But if I wanted them to go to the effort of doing a photograph or filling in some details that we could them onto our mailing list, then I really need to be thinking about offering something bigger.Which brings me onto my next point, that you don't necessarily have to just give your product or service away. You can use complementing products and services, as well. Go back to our gin example. If I wanted someone to go to a bit more effort, then what could I possibly do if all we do is sell gin? Can I give them two bottles, three bottles, a lifetime supply of bottles, or should I pick other products that go with...