subject: 5 Steps To Create A Social Media Sweepstakes [print this page] According to Jupiter Research/Forrester, 80 percent of all Internet users have entered at least one sweepstakes within the last 12 months, and more than half participate in contests at least once per month.
Here is an outline of how any company can offer people a chance to win a prize in exchange for a little effort and personal information, as well as passing the offer on to friends and family. Social media sweepstakes and contests are great ways to land new prospects and customers.
Here is how you can do it:
1. What is a sweepstakes?
In this form of competition, winners are selected randomly. Entering a sweepstakes is the sole qualification to participate. It doesn't have to be that way, though. You can also add a question to build a certain level of intelligent effort into it. In fact, in several countries law requires this.
2. Set a clear goal.
There are a number of goals a company may want to achieve with a contest. Here are some:
Increase brand awareness
Collect information on consumer demographics
Gather research on consumer psychographics
Add new subscribers to Facebook, email newsletters, Twitter, RSS
Obtain user-generated content
Acquire names and addresses
You may even want to educate the participants or gather research.
3. Set terms and rules.
Use experienced professionals to write official terms and rules. Keep in mind that it's illegal to require people to make a purchase before entering and that you can't even suggest that making a purchase will increase their chances of winning.
4. Choose a prize.
Make sure you choose a prize that will capture the attention of participants. It should be relevant for your audience, and it's nice if it's related to your business in one way or another.
In order to motivate participants to share, your sweepstakes campaign should include a "You win/I win" feature. This means that if one of the participant's referrals wins, the referrer wins too, ensuring that there is a motivation for sharing. On the other hand, if you don't offer the "You win/I win" feature, participants' chances to win are reduced by every referral they make.
5. Market it.
Tell your existing fan base, whether it's through Facebook, email, Twitter or wherever, about your sweepstakes. You want to market the sweepstakes online and offline, reflecting your budget, creativity and purpose.
Use a referral marketing platform to run it. There are a number of referral marketing platforms available, like Vinatta. Such services are inexpensive, easy to use and rich in features to address security issues, branding, accountability and systems reliability.
Vinatta offers a premade, ready-to-use Facebook tab page for you to insert on your Facebook page. The referral marketing platform will include a number of other sharing features too. This is, of course, important in order to gain what all marketers dream ofgoing viral.
And that's it.
When the sweepstakes is over, choose the winner and promote it. Most referral marketing platforms include a drawing feature.
In your next communication with your fan base, make sure you let them know about the result. At the same time, why don't you offer them a special treat for participating?
