A social media giveaway is a proven strategy to boost engagement and awareness for your online business. Are you curious on how to run a successful social media contest? In this article we cover all of the must-follow steps, so you can start building a great rapport with your online followers.

Step 1: Set your goals

There are varying reasons to host contests. So what’s your goal here? Determine whether you’re trying to increase social media followers, generate more leads or simply increase brand awareness. Each goal can lead to different types of contests, so you need to begin by knowing what you’d like to achieve.

Step 2: Determine your contest type

Once you know your goal, you can base the type of contest on the outcome you’re looking for. If you want to increase your following, request entrants to follow your page to enter.

If you want to generate more leads, you can request that people sign up or enter their email. These can be done on a landing page, or you can create a Facebook tab specifically for your giveaway.

Or if you’re most interested in simply generating brand awareness, you can collaborate with other companies and both share the giveaway, or ask entrants to tag a friend as a form of entry to spread the word.

Step 3: Pinpoint your budget

If you plan on running regular giveaways (which is a great strategy to keep your followers engaged and excited), make sure you plan out a budget for the year.

Once you know how much you can spend on the giveaway, you can break it up between ads to promote the contest and money to put behind the prize.

Step 4: Choose your prize wisely

For the best results, select a prize that’s tempting. The higher the perceived value of your prize, the better. It needs to be tangible.

It should also be relevant to your business and potential customers. For instance, if you run a membership site, you could give away free access to your membership for a year. That way, you’re capturing the interest of prospective customers with an enticing offer that’s aligned with your core product.

Step 5: Test different platforms

Test social media giveaways on different platforms to see which one generates the largest response. Figure out if Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram or another platform will bring you the best results, then focus on that platform to lead your future recurring contests.

If you already know there’s a social media platform that outperforms all of the rest for your business, you may want to skip this step.

Step 6: Run your social media giveaway

We’ve made it! It’s time to start your giveaway. Announce it on your chosen social media platform, and give it a boost to increase your reach even further. Cross-promote it on other platforms, your email newsletter and even your website to create more buzz.

Announce your prizes, set the length of your contest (no more than 2 weeks otherwise it will lose momentum) and watch as the entries pour in.

Step 7: Measure your results

Once the contest is over, you’ve announced the winner and sent off their prize, it’s time to check out the results. How well did your social media giveaway actually perform?

This goes all the way back to your goal. What were you trying to achieve? You want to measure results based on what your objective were.

Social media giveaways should be all about improving engagement, reach, followers and potential customers.