Given the difficulty in capturing the attention of today’s consumer, running a competition on social media can be a daunting project. Those that do see a flurry of excited participants often fail to utilise this buzz for any long-term benefit, and before long the prospective customer has become distracted by the next mildly interesting piece of content on their timeline. Pessimistic right? Assuming you’re still with me, here are five things that should be considered when running your next social competition.

 Figure 1: Source – Brand Manage Camp

1) Mobile optimisation

This one goes without saying considering nearly all time spent on social media is done on mobile devices, however it is not enough to have a landing page that simply works on a consumers mobile phone. Research from Google (2016) has found that 53% of individuals will leave a mobile web page if it does not load in as little as 3 seconds. Failure to have a fast competition landing page will not only result in a lack of engagement with your competition, rather it will also reduce the amount of ad revenue that can be gained. For want of technical jargon, Impact have outlined five ways to reduce website load time.

2) Embrace user-generated content

User-generated content is a great way to get people engaged with your competition, with 90% of consumers claiming that such content is more influential in their buying decisions than promotional emails and search engine results (TurnTo 2017).  Consumers now demand  ‘authentic’ brand experiences, using fellow customers as one of many information points when interacting with a brand. Additionally, customers provided with an opportunity to make their own content will be driven by their motivation to achieve a sense of self-affirmation, when completing a task that they find interesting (Kende et al 2016).

The complexity of the application entry should depend on the overall aim of the competition, and should not be challenging to the point that customers become disinterested. High involvement activities that take a lot of commitment and skill are great for generating high levels of loyalty among a smaller population of people who are totally on-board with your brand. Less complex ideas such as Doritos eliminate a flavour campaign, are less likely to gain highly loyal customers but more likely to achieve a wider participation rate.  One risk in giving users free reign over the content they produce for your competition, especially with campaigns that require little user involvement, is that individuals will often look to hijack the campaign, with the results often going viral.

You all remembered Boaty McBoatface right? To avoid such issues, we suggest investing in both human and app-based content moderators, or aborting the idea of posting live automated consumer-generated content on a mass scale altogether.

3) Find out more about your customer than just their email address

Countless articles express the need for competitions to generate email leads, yet there is only so far a personalised email will get you. Only 25% of marketing emails on average end up being opened by the customer (Chaffey 2018). Meaningful data can be collected in the entry criteria for the competition, looking back at the example of Doritos who used the competition to generate data about the preference of their customers. Data can also be collected in an interactive way, such as asking users to complete a short quiz related to products they might be interested in, incentivising their efforts with a money off voucher as well as a competition entry. Ask yourself if the data you are asking for is really relevant, and to steadily build a picture of your customer over time, rather than trying to know everything about them in one go.

Use social listening tools to see what people are saying about your competition, and if you wanted to be really tech savvy, try using tracking parameters in the form of UTM codes. These customisable pieces of URL text work in conjunction with Google Analytics to track which channels and sources are driving visitors to your competition landing page. These codes could also be used to see how many new visitors to your competition landing page then decide to browse your website homepage. For more information on this, check out this other blog post here.

4) Choose an appropriate time frame

The approporiate time frame for running a social media competition will vary depending on the goal and nature of the competition. Those that require skill to enter should allow enough time for creative entries to be submitted, whereas those designed to generate a short lived buzz around your brand could last as little as a week. I advise that regardless of the nature and aim of the competition, that social media competitions do not exceed 8 weeks from start to finish, as the majority of those who enter social media competitions are aged 16-35 and typically impulse driven (Fang and Mowen 2009).

5) Incentivise social sharing

Incentivising participants to share your competition across various social platforms will enable you to spread the reach of your social media competition. For competitions centred around user-generated content, one way to incentivise this would be to feature competition entries on the homepage of their website should the participant share it on multiple platforms. Giving participants the chance to have their work appreciated by others would also give them a sense of pride in the content they create for your brand, giving your competition the positive publicity it needs to resonate with consumers.

Chaffey, D. (2018). Email marketing engagement and response statistics 2018. [online] Smart Insights. Available at: https://www.smartinsights.com/email-marketing/email-communications-strategy/statistics-sources-for-email-marketing/#q2 [Accessed 27 Mar. 2018].

Fang, X. and Mowen, J. (2009). Examining the trait and functional motive antecedents of four gambling activities: slot machines, skilled card games, sports betting, and promotional games. Journal of Consumer Marketing, [online] 26(2), pp.121-131. Available at: https://www-tandfonline-com.ezproxy.brighton.ac.uk/doi/pdf/10.1080/10696679.2015.980172?needAccess=true [Accessed 29 Mar. 2018].

Google. (2016). Mobile speed impacts publisher revenue. [online] Available at: https://www.doubleclickbygoogle.com/articles/mobile-speed-matters/ [Accessed 27 Mar. 2018].

Kende, A., van Zomeren, M., Ujhelyi, A. and Lantos, N. (2016). The social affirmation use of social media as a motivator of collective action. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, [online] 46(8), pp.453-461. Available at: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/jasp.12375 [Accessed 1 Apr. 2018].

TurnTo (2017). Hearing the Voice of the Consumer. UGC and the Commerce Experience. [online] TurnTo, p.10. Available at: http://www2.turntonetworks.com/2017consumerstudy [Accessed 1 Apr. 2018].