Social Media Contests Made Easy
As Twitter and Facebook have shown time and time again, social media is not a passing fad. It has become a tool for friends to connect, families to communicate and businesses to engage with their customers. Social media is a universal tool used by hundreds of millions of people every day, providing a cost-effective option to put your brand in the spotlight.
With this boost in social media use has come innovative marketing techniques by Fortune 100 companies, start-ups and every business in between. And the greatest tool used by these businesses is the social media driven contest. Chances are you are not the owner of global enterprise, but even if you are, keep reading.
As a social media marketer, I have planned, initiated and monitored Twitter and Facebook contests with outstanding results. But it has also provided great insight on the marketing and monitoring challenges associated with an online contest. A simple t-shirt giveaway to boost brand awareness for your business can actually be quite complicated. What looks great on paper is rarely a reality; and while social media certainly provides a cost-effective, if not free, solution to marketing needs on a shoe-string budget, the time invested into an online contest can be as equally expensive and effect your bottom line.
Running an online contest is much more than choosing a product to give away, telling people about it, selecting a winner and shipping the prize. Behind the scenes, you must monitor every submission, retweet, status update and any other requirement needed to participate in the contest. The ongoing monitoring of your contest is where the pennies start to add up, either through the cost of developing a platform to collect information or the time required to manually collect the data.
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