Today I will be writing my first blog post ever to the public especially for the University of Brighton, I will be talking about a specific strategy used to attract more customers and gain more followers while awarding a prize to a winner among thousands in the social media world.

The strategy is called the “Giveaway contest”, it started with Twitter in 2010 and then Instagram and Facebook were following the legacy.

This strategy is used by all sorts of different industries, we can find it in the F&B industry, fashion, Design, automotive and many more, however in order to utilize this strategy properly and get the best results, we have to work on some few steps in the right way to begin with.

1. What is the objective and purpose of this strategy? why are you using it, and what is the goal that you want to reach? It can be gaining more followers or raising your product awareness or even marketing a new one?

2. Who do you want to reach? Who is your target and what audience will be engaged into the strategy? In the case of google ads for example you need to know which criteria can be met to the fullest by the potential customers, including the target age, demography, gender and so on.

3. Why would they join the contest? Why would they rather accept than refuse to do it? Well, it depends on what you will be asking your audience to do, if it is going to be very long like asking them to like 5 photos and follow IG page and comment and share and add minimum 5 friends, that is never going to work because it will be really boring and very long. They should be able to complete it with pleasure and enjoy doing it. It needs to be easy and simple to execute without any boundaries.

4. What will be the post? Is it a photo or a video? Let’s say we decide to publish a photo, will it be an image of the prize or the logo? Is it going to be your new product that you want to market? a photo of yourself? Will it contain some writings? It needs to be surprising and astonishing keeping the consumer focused with a feeling that the product is actually valuable.

5. Which hashtags will be used? Hashtags are mainly used to attract more people around the world, knowing which hashtags to use and link it with your contest to match the correct brand image, atmosphere, target demography, lifestyle, is actually very important to get the best results.

6. What will be the prize? Would it satisfy and let more people join the contest? Is it a gift card to your restaurant, a free meal, a free book, your new product that you want to promote? It needs to be something that sets the business up, shows a large picture of the business.

7. Do you need to promote some ads? If it is a small business and you have just started with less than 1k followers maybe promoting is a good idea to further increase the audience, it would help a lot in the beginnings.

8. How long will the participation period be? This is important because people can easily get bored while waiting weeks or months for the results, even after winning, all the pleasure and excitement will be gone. The best choice for the participation period should not exceed two weeks in order to get more people joining the contest and not forget about your product or brand.

9. How to select a winner? There is a very easy way to choose a winner without really counting or writing down everyone’s name, Gleam is a good and automated tool that helps you distinguish which player actually followed or liked or commented on the chosen photo or video, you could therefore easily choose one of them.

10. Thank you for reading this post and I hope that it was useful for you guys,  hopefully you will get something out of it and it could  help you with your business, in the near future.

If you will be using this contest or have used in the past, please let me know on the comments below which points you found useful and what wasn’t.

You will find below two different contents of an Instagram post about a giveaway contest and please share your thoughts below and let me know what you find different about these two posts.

Thank you

Linkedln profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/slahsmoali/

SLAH SMOALI

REFERENCES:

https://blog.woobox.com/tag/instagram-contest/.  2010.Instagram contest.

https://heyo.com/. 2012.grow your business with promotions.