If you have spent any time on social media, you have seen some sort of social media contest before. When contests are done properly and effectively, your brand can benefit in many ways.
One company who ran a successful social media giveaway is Roolee. Roolee is a clothing brand based out of Logan, Utah inspired by self-love and genuine sisterhood.
They ran a giveaway on their Instagram giving away a year of free clothes! In order to enter, contestants need to follow their Instagram page, like the post, and tag someone they love. Contestants could double their chances of winning by reposting any picture from Roolee’s feed to their own feed and use a hashtag for them to track it. They added additional ways to enter posts on their website.
This giveaway was extremely successful for a number of reasons. They had over 100,000 likes on the post and over 487,000 entries on Instagram comments alone. Roolee was able to get more people talking about their brand, incentivize people to follow them on social media and create calls-to-action.
1. Get More People Talking About Your Brand
Giveaways can easily build awareness by having the followers tag someone they love in the comments, as well as share their story about the giveaway. This post went viral because in order to enter, contestants had to at least tag one person. Many people tagged their friends and shared it to their stories helping the post reach hundreds of people.
2. Incentivize people to follow
Another key thing Roolee accomplished was creating a good incentive for people to want to enter- an entire year of free clothes! This is an awesome giveaway, and they didn’t make it too complicated to enter. They allowed multiple ways to enter, but one action everyone had to take in order to be qualified for the giveaway was to follow Roolee on Instagram. They were able to create a great incentive just for a simple follow.
3. Create a Call-to-Action
In this giveaway, Roolee creates a couple calls to action to get people to enter the giveaway. They not only had contestants follow their Instagram page, like the post, and tag someone they love in the comments, but they also drove people back to their website. People had the option to head to roolee.com to find additional ways to enter the competition. These calls-to-action created virality in the posts, increased their followers on social media as well as increased their website traffic.
While this was a very successful giveaway on social media, there are a couple things they could have improved on.
1. Give More Detail
The prize is “a year of free clothes.” But what exactly does that mean? Is that a new outfit every day? Or a new outfit every month? A credit towards the store for the year? The prize sounds like a great prize, but you don’t want to be misleading with the giveaway. Be clear about the prize. You want to be as transparent with your customers as possible.
2. Make it Less Complicated
There are many steps to enter this giveaway. The simpler the better. We recommend having two calls to action at most. In this competition, Roolee gives contestants multiple steps to enter. They have to follow Roolee on Instagram, like the pic, tag someone, share on their personal feed, go to the website to find more ways to enter and complete all those entries as well. The easier you make it, the more entries you will get.
We have helped clients run many competitions/giveaways at Gigg and here are some of the best practices we live by!
3. Create User-Generated Content
The best thing Roolee could have done is to keep the giveaway authentic. By leveraging contestants to post their own user-generated content, instead of having contestants choose a picture from Roolee’s Instagram to post to their own feed. Roolee could have had contestants post a picture of themselves either wearing Roolee clothing, and a reason why they love Roolee and want to win the giveaway. Creating and using UGC is true branding. User generated content is 20% more influential than any other type of media when it comes to influencing Millennial purchases.
Incentivize people to post about your brand. This not only gets others talking about you, but gives the company content to post to their own social channels. User-generated content is powerful and should be leveraged in any social media giveaway.
How Gigg Can Help
We have recently added a new product called Competitions. Automating competitions can be a terrific way to drive awareness, site traffic, followers, and engagement. However, creating and running these contests can get rather tedious. Our new product called Competitions can help host competitions on a regular basis in an automated and simplified way.
Here you can learn how easy it is to create a Competition within the Gigg tool. Running contests on your social media can add value to your company/brand, but you want it to be successful.
