Winning: one of those feel good moments in a customer’s journey, that gives you a great opportunity to boost your brand, engagement, and grow your following like crazy. Although it may be one of the oldest tricks in the book, giveaways and competitions remain one of the best organic engagement tactics still active in 2019.

These competitions can range from a simple product or service giveaway from a small brand, to full blown campaigns that cause media buzz and spread like wildfire. Take HelloFresh and BellaBox’s collaboration in 2018. Teaming up on Instagram, they had a simple premise: Tag-a-friend, win a prize. Giveaways like this have a low barrier to entry, encourage engagement AND are a surefire way to introduce your product or service offering to new followers. Essentially, to run a successful campaign, your competition doesn’t have to be complicated. Keep it Simple.

Here are our 4 top tips to turn your next competition or social media giveaway into a sweet success:

1. Offer some sweet prizes – Relevant to your audience

Let’s be honest, a good prize is the number one reason people will participate in your contest. Make your prizes good quality, but also relevant to your audience. After all, you wouldn’t offer something that had no correlation to your product or service offering!

Some great prize ideas could be:

- Your own products or services
- A gift card or money (to your own brand or similar)
- Another product related to your brand or,
- A unique experience or vacation (However! Tie this prize in with your brand)
After you’ve determined your prize, you need to choose the hook for your contest. Realistically, not all brands can afford all expenses paid trips around the world, and instead focus on a small prize, with a low barrier to entry. The harder the entry vs prize value, the less engagement you are likely to have.

2. Collaborate with another brand or influencer that complements yours

Power in numbers, right? Collaborations on Social media, particularly with influential people and businesses, can increase the performance, reach and engagement of your competitions. There are a few key ways other brands and influencers make this so successful. A common way is for an influencer to create content, using your product or service, in which you share on your own account. Alternatively, you can partner with another brand with similar values as yours and pitch in together across both accounts to double the engagement and reach opportunities for your campaign (not to mention provide a more substantial, enticing prize). At the end of the day, both approaches have benefits and it depends on your goals and the type of influencers or brands you are working with.

3. Time is of the essence

Working on the element of time scarcity is crucial! All competitions have to end, and nobody likes waiting around for months, holding their breath or simply forgetting. Make sure your contest has mastered the fine balance of running long enough that people have time to enter, while not dragging it out so long that you lose engagement and hype.

4. Understand your audience – and where they spend their time.

You’ve got goals, a prize, and you understand what will capture your audience’s attention. But do you know what the best performing channel for your business is? Understanding where your audience spends a majority of their time on social media is imperative to running a successful campaign. You wouldn’t run your campaign strictly on Twitter if you know your clients predominately engage on Instagram, would you?

If most of your engagement is across two or so channels, no worries! This simply provides an opportunity to either restrict your campaign to one channel, and invite your current customers to follow you there for a chance of winning, or alternatively increase your reach further by spreading the giveaway across two or more channels. Have a play around, do some split testing and come up with a winning formula that suits your brand.

Bonus tip: When the contest dies down, the winner has been chosen and the prize went, make sure you run some data analysis on social engagement, growth and reflect on your competition. Did you achieve your goals? Increase and maintain engagement or growth? What worked, what didn’t and what surprised you? Take all this information and create benchmarks for your next Social Media Competition.