Today’s post was written by SmartBrief’s Abe Silk.
As part of the ongoing Social Media Success Summit, Michael Stelzner, who has run a number of social media contests via his website Social Media Examiner, gave a great primer on how to run a successful social media contest. With the advent of social media, businesses and organizations can now create effective contests that generate a lot of buzz with even a very small budget, Stelzner said.
Here are some of Stelzner’s tips for great contests:
- Keeping it simple. According to Stelzner, the key to a successful social media contest is to make the reward valuable and compelling, while keeping the work people have to do to win to a minimum. As a case study, he used the example of SMSS itself, which gave away one ticket for just tweeting a pre-created tweet and two tickets for writing a blog post or commenting on the official blog.
- Creating a winning tweet. Twitter is a great tool for spreading the word quickly, and Stelzner argues that the wording of the tweets you create is crucial. He suggests using a bit.ly tracking link to monitor sharing, creating a hashtag so that you can easily identify winners and creating compelling language that invites interaction. For SMSS they used, “I want to win.”
- Promote well. For SMSS, Stelzner began with a blog post, but quickly followed-up with an e-mail to “fence sitters,” or people who had expressed an interest but hadn’t yet bought a ticket. He also suggested leveraging affiliates and crafting tweets and blog posts for them and also crediting them with a sale if someone they sourced won the contest.
For more great social-media sessions, check out the continuing 100% online Social Media Success Summit that (full disclosure) SmartBrief helped plan. For access to the whole session and many others, sign up here.
Image credit, Viorel Sima, via Shutterstock
Twitter
Facebook
Linkedin
RSS
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Ana Hoffman, Santi Chacon. Santi Chacon said: SMSS: All about social media contests with Michael Stelzner: Today’s post was written by SmartBrief’s Abe Silk. As… http://bit.ly/b2HWLj [...]
Thanks for the great review of my session! – Mike
My recent post Study Shows Time Pays With Social Media Marketing
Very good and accurate recommendations. I might quibble a bit about, "keeping the work people have to do to win to a minimum." That's very true, unless you give them "work" that's fun and a chance to win multiple prizes for their engagement. That's why we built our contest platform for Facebook (called Idea Challenges) with a prize vault with both valuable prizes and compelling cheapies, which people can buy using points they earn for participating. We have done simple submission contests, but our Idea Challenges get more than 5 minutes per user and have generated more than 500,000 interactions in a single event, so it's clear people can really enjoy more complex interactions.
Hope this didn't sound too much like a commercial, just wanted to share the fact that high-interaction events work too, and can actually be easier to setup and manage. Happy to share more data if you're interested. @bulbstorm.
I have an article you might find valuable. It's entitled "20 Expert Tips on Running a Contest Powered by Social Media."http://bit.ly/btfdEL
My recent post Is complaining publicly the best way to get customer service?
I love social media contests and these tips are great. I have concerns when contests though are not reflective of the brand…I mean…AT ALL. I know you say keep it simple, and I agree, but shouldn’t it have something to do with your brand and raising brand awareness…to an extent? http://bit.ly/cHpE7q
And here's a whole other view about contests from the social good sector http://www.bethkanter.org/crowdsourcing/
Thanks for the link Beth, that's some really interesting stuff and a great interview to boot.
[...] you’ve reached the tactical stage with your contest, Michael Stelzner offers a few tips to create successful contests with social [...]
[...] Simplicity is the key to social-contest success Keep contests and promotions simple to get ahead in the world of social marketing, says Social Media Examiner’s Michael Stelzner. Promotions that require too much time or energy — from either your customers or your own social-media team — aren’t likely to take root, Stelzner explains. SmartBrief/SmartBlog on Social Media [...]
As a REALTOR® with a technology background, other REALTORS® and I recognize how important and beneficial social media is for our industry. Personal branding is becoming paramount because people can be found more easily everyday, plus our business and personal lives are growing less distinct.
As an information disseminator, I enjoy helping real estate professionals and clients with understanding what social media is, why it's beneficial, how they can start using it, and determining their goals for future usage. I try hard. I'd appreciate some tickets. Thanks for the promo!
Cliff Paulick
Owasso, Oklahoma
call/text: 918-409-2543 http://www.cliffpaulick.com
My recent post See What My Friends “Like” and “Share” via LikeButtonme
This are 3 great points, one other important point is to make a great landing pages for the contest where you can get some more infos and feedback from your users.
Greetings