What's The Best Way To Host A Must-Enter Competition Online?

Earlier this week we went through the beginning stages of running a creative online competition, including thinking of a prize, deciding how your users can enter, understanding the required content and creating a budget. Today we want to reveal to you the next few stages of creating a fantastic competition to build your social media followings and increase your sales. Let’s jump straight in…

Step 5: Decide how long you want to run the competition for

Let’s be honest: dragging a competition out for too long will just generate a lack of interest surrounding it as it can seem too distant. However, running a competition for too short a time can mean that you risk missing out on more entries. So what is the happy medium? The answer here is that it’s personal to your campaign – you need to consider several factors. Do you have a large existing community to promote to or are you relying on a lot of external traffic sources? If it’s the former you don’t need as long and you could do a 24 hour flash competition but if it’s the latter, you may want to take your time with it. We recommend around 1-3 weeks depending on the value of the prize.

Step 6: Run your competition

We don’t need to explain this one for you! Go ahead and have fun with it.

Step 7: Track your results

There’s no point in doing a competition if you can’t learn from it – it’s vital that you track your results. Take some time compiling the statistics from Facebook, Twitter, Google Analytics etc. You don’t need to pay to track your results – there’s plenty of fantastic websites out there that can help you for no cost at all.

Step 8: Choose your winners

Arguably the most exciting part of a competition is choosing your winners! You could select them from random or it could be a factored decision. Either way, we recommend creating a huge hype out of selecting the winner on social media to generate some fantastic social activity and let people see what else you can offer. Consider contacting your winner and asking them to take a photo of themselves with the prize with their permission to post it on your social media accounts – this adds a great personal touch to your profiles whilst generating exciting activity. You could also take the time to send the photo out to your email subscriber list to show off the lucky winner and let them know that there could be more to come.

We wish you the best of luck in creating your competition! Bear these steps in mind and a fantastic, creative competition should be created.