The Holidays Are A Great Time To Run A Contest For Your Business.
Holiday Contest - The Holidays are a great time to run a Contest for your Business. A Holiday Contest can be a great attention getter. Here are some tips we have for planning a Holiday Contest on Twitter.
To start you need to find what interests your audience or something that is popular in general when you start to plan a Holiday Contest. Like most social media campaigns, the most effective themes and rewards are typically associated with similar interests or experiences. Those favorites could be music, books, movies, travel, fashion etc. You want to build a Holiday Contest that taps into the passion of your audience, and “goes with the flow” so your followers will want to be a part and share their own stories.
Do you want to have a Holiday Contest or Sweepstakes?
A contest is generally judged on merit where with a Sweepstakes you are awarded a prize or prizes based on random draw. Users will follow and tweet/retweet to get an entry to your Holiday Contest. Or you can use a a plain old giveaway where you award a prize to the 97th person to tweet a correct answer to a contest question. Another variation is the have say the first 50, where the first 50 followers to tweet will qualify to win a prize such as a gift certificate or a free hotel voucher.
You could run a Holiday Contest that promotes a special occasion or a new product. You do not have to call it a "Holiday Contest" as it could be for any occasion you want. To build up a good report you could have a Holiday Contest that runs several times through out the Holidays. For instance do a riddle. From Monday to Friday give a clue each day. You only get one guess and it must be submitted by midnight on Friday. To really mix up your Holiday Contest have all winners who guessed what the riddle was, give them another one, and those finalists only have a day to come up with an answer. You can do variations of this depending on how many prizes you are going to giveaway. That Holiday Contest example is a great way to keep people coming back to you on twitter and interacting with you and your product on a frequent basis.
Your Holiday Contest is a way to spread the word by keeping your current circles intrigued and the same time picking up new followers.
You will want to have people include a descriptive hashtag like #Riddlemethis in their tweets. This will make it easier for others to click and learn more about your Holiday Contest along with seeing all related tweets. When you tweet updates about your contest, remember to include the hashtag yourself (see below). These hashtags will let people identify with you and your company.
Try to partner with others to expand your circle. Look for opportunities to run contests/sweepstakes with partners to add their circles to your audience. The partner could be a prize sponsor or service provider. When following is required to enter (we strongly suggest), users will follow your company and your partners. It is a win, win situation.
Beyond creating a great concept and approach for your Holiday Contest there are some additional ways that you can draw people in to participation. In turn have them spread the word and catapult your contest performance.
Gift Certificates always seem to go over well. With a gift certificates the winner can use it for anything in that store or restaurant etc. Top items like iPads and iPods also go over very well. Keep it simple with a “Follow and Tweet to enter” works for the majority of people. Always use your email lists, displays if you have a store front and all social media even if it is a “Twitter Contest”.
For your first contest we would suggest having it run at least a week to get people entering. Make sure when it is done to immediately let everyone know when your next one is going to happen. Even a rough estimate. You got their attention so keep it. Make sure you give updates frequently, at least two or three times a day.
Make your rules VERY transparent. Have your rules or links to your rules very visible. Make sure you have all the who, what, when, where and why's. Most of all, what you are giving away. Try to make your Holiday Contest as fun and interesting as possible. An average boring Holiday Contest could get looked over as there are others out there as well to enter.
Come visit us and win!
Sweepstakes 13 - A Place for Winners!
To start you need to find what interests your audience or something that is popular in general when you start to plan a Holiday Contest. Like most social media campaigns, the most effective themes and rewards are typically associated with similar interests or experiences. Those favorites could be music, books, movies, travel, fashion etc. You want to build a Holiday Contest that taps into the passion of your audience, and “goes with the flow” so your followers will want to be a part and share their own stories.
Do you want to have a Holiday Contest or Sweepstakes?
A contest is generally judged on merit where with a Sweepstakes you are awarded a prize or prizes based on random draw. Users will follow and tweet/retweet to get an entry to your Holiday Contest. Or you can use a a plain old giveaway where you award a prize to the 97th person to tweet a correct answer to a contest question. Another variation is the have say the first 50, where the first 50 followers to tweet will qualify to win a prize such as a gift certificate or a free hotel voucher.
You could run a Holiday Contest that promotes a special occasion or a new product. You do not have to call it a "Holiday Contest" as it could be for any occasion you want. To build up a good report you could have a Holiday Contest that runs several times through out the Holidays. For instance do a riddle. From Monday to Friday give a clue each day. You only get one guess and it must be submitted by midnight on Friday. To really mix up your Holiday Contest have all winners who guessed what the riddle was, give them another one, and those finalists only have a day to come up with an answer. You can do variations of this depending on how many prizes you are going to giveaway. That Holiday Contest example is a great way to keep people coming back to you on twitter and interacting with you and your product on a frequent basis.
Your Holiday Contest is a way to spread the word by keeping your current circles intrigued and the same time picking up new followers.
You will want to have people include a descriptive hashtag like #Riddlemethis in their tweets. This will make it easier for others to click and learn more about your Holiday Contest along with seeing all related tweets. When you tweet updates about your contest, remember to include the hashtag yourself (see below). These hashtags will let people identify with you and your company.
Try to partner with others to expand your circle. Look for opportunities to run contests/sweepstakes with partners to add their circles to your audience. The partner could be a prize sponsor or service provider. When following is required to enter (we strongly suggest), users will follow your company and your partners. It is a win, win situation.
Beyond creating a great concept and approach for your Holiday Contest there are some additional ways that you can draw people in to participation. In turn have them spread the word and catapult your contest performance.
Gift Certificates always seem to go over well. With a gift certificates the winner can use it for anything in that store or restaurant etc. Top items like iPads and iPods also go over very well. Keep it simple with a “Follow and Tweet to enter” works for the majority of people. Always use your email lists, displays if you have a store front and all social media even if it is a “Twitter Contest”.
For your first contest we would suggest having it run at least a week to get people entering. Make sure when it is done to immediately let everyone know when your next one is going to happen. Even a rough estimate. You got their attention so keep it. Make sure you give updates frequently, at least two or three times a day.
Make your rules VERY transparent. Have your rules or links to your rules very visible. Make sure you have all the who, what, when, where and why's. Most of all, what you are giving away. Try to make your Holiday Contest as fun and interesting as possible. An average boring Holiday Contest could get looked over as there are others out there as well to enter.
Come visit us and win!
Sweepstakes 13 - A Place for Winners!
