Like any social media manager, I am always on the lookout for new and exciting ways to both keep my current audience engaged, at the same time as attracting new followers. One quick win that can achieve both aims is running a competition via your social media portals.
Before you get carried away with the exciting promotion, prize or competition angle you might have on offer, and what format your contest will take, you have to remember you are doing this for business reasons. As such, it is imperative to establish what your goals are that you are trying to achieve through running a competition, and the metrics that you will be measuring success against.
Ultimately, you must decide what your objectives are and matter the most to your ideal end result, and set the metrics against them. Some campaigns go ‘viral’, and those do so in the main due to a great deal of planning and preparation going into building the momentum for something to take on a life of its own. Therefore, even if you aren’t in possession of a massive advertising budget, you must be prepared to allocate a decent amount of time and manpower into this project.
These for me would be the key points to consider when measuring the success of your social media competition:
- – Number of visits to your promotion page, and average time spent
- – Did they share the page to their networks?
- – How many actually entered the competition?
- – Level of activity on Twitter such as retweets, increased follower numbers, competition specific hashtag
- – Level of activity on Facebook such as Likes and Shares
- – Redemption rate of special offer codes or vouchers
- – Click-through rates from outbound links
- – Additional users who allowed themselves to be added to marketing and email lists
- – How much revenue/profit/new business can be attributed to the completion?
