Bertha's Blog: How to Create a Successful Social Media Giveaway

Social media has taken the world by storm. Various businesses and brands are taking full advantage of it to reach their target audience via social media. Social media also helps businesses to increase their audience and building a customer base for them.

There are many strategies and campaigns used for this. One is social media giveaway. While it seems really easy, it is actually very difficult to launch a successful social media giveaway. Only few giveaways actually drive value to your business. That’s why your social media giveaway campaign needs to be effective enough in order to give your business the right boost.

Following are the steps that will help you in launching a successful social media giveaway.

1. Set a measurable goal

Your goal should be measurable and trackable. When setting a goal for social media giveaway, you should consider the following factors:

What is the focus of this giveaway campaign, is it to increase user engagement? Or it just focuses on increasing your likes on social media channels? Or is it really just a link building strategy?
Once you have decided your primary focus, set a measurable goal, for instance if you want to increase 1000 likes, divide the likes into number of days you are running the contest. For instance 250 likes in a day, if you achieve these likes on first day, that means your goal was achievable. If you don’t achieve your daily target, you need to either alter your strategy or revise your goals.

One good example of the giveaway goal can be: a government encouraging its people to GST Return Filing practice. But the right way would be to offer such a giveaway that audience will be tempted to go through this process because of the reward. No government ever enforces this through social media but since it is very effective, the use of social media giveaways can actually get people to do stuff which they wouldn’t otherwise.

2. Go beyond traditional marketing

The 4Cs are the modern form of 4Ps of marketing. The 4Cs include customer value, cost, convenience and communication. When you are creating a giveaway campaign, you need to do complete research or your target audience, the product or service you are giving away and its impact on target audience. So, don’t just focus on 4Cs because they are not enough for reaching your goals. Modern social media marketing is very complex and it requires you to understand your customer’s psyche more than any modern marketing framework.

3. What are you giving away?

That’s a very important question since you will be the one bearing the cost. For instance, you are an internet services providing company giving away a Modem Router Combo product. You need to decide some important things like how many modern routers are you giving, who is most likely to buy your router and what is the cost that you are covering, what are your terms and conditions and so on.

4. Use alternatives like coupons

Some social media giveaway do not even giveaway any specific product but they instead make use of coupons and offer discount coupons which is a great way to get your audience to visit your actual stores and increase your sales. This is a great way to save the cost of giving away just free stuff while not actually having the audience visit you.

5. The right marketing

Starting a giveaway might seem really easy but it really gets complex when you have to get people talking about it. So it is highly important to do the right marketing for your social media giveaway. In order to do the right marketing you have to think about the target audience who’d be interested in actively participating in your giveaway. It is really easy to get people talking for a t-shirt or hoodie but it gets really challenging when you try to sell a service. For instance, you are providing medical tourism services on online platforms. In this case the right option would be to take a little help from experts in the field who do proper Medical Tourism Marketing, it might cost you a little but in the end it will be worth all the trouble.

6. Reach out to bloggers

Once you have designed a great social media giveaway, the next step would be to market your contest. There are many ways to do it but one great way is to reach out to various bloggers in your niche and get them to talk about your contest. In return you can give a shout out to them on your social media channels.

For instance, a jewelry company could start a contest for marketing the launch of a series of engagement ring designs. Through an influencer’s site like Beyond 4Cs which have a regular audience of jewelry shoppers, it is easy to get your message across to a very targeted niche of consumers.

7. Constant promotion is the key

Your giveaway should be constantly promoted in order to get more audience share and more responses. This can be done on all social media channels. You shouldn’t stay quiet when you have arranged a contest! People are most likely to listen to you during this time and you should use this time to get your message across and to gain more and more audience.

8. Keep the audience hopeful

Never say that this is the only contest you are holding, always keep your audience coming back for more. Tell people the date of your next contest or just tell them that you are having another contest pretty soon. Also, when you build a good number of followers it is not necessary for you to hold contests every now and then.

9. Credibility is important

After you have built your credibility, your audience will trust you with everything. For instance if you post the best cell phone reviews, your audience will take your word even if you have nothing to do with cell phones. But make sure that you don’t mislead your audience.

10. Do announce the winners

There are many fake contests trying to seek attention of users. Most of them, in the end, just annoy customers. That’s why it is important to announce your winner rather than just reaching out to them. When you announce winners, make sure to cater other hopeful contestants too and tell them how much you appreciate their participation.

11. Get the winners to share their experience

You must get your audience to review your giveaway product and their experience with your audience. This will encourage others to follow your social media channels and gain your credibility.