Hosting a social giveaway is an easy way to spike engagement and gain new traffic on all platforms. They’re also feasible for businesses across the spectrum and not as difficult as they may seem! These simple to follow steps will ease you into the contest world.
#GOALS
Setting goals for any kind of giveaway is important because, in order for the contest to benefit your company in any way, the goal needs to directly correlate with whatever corporate initiative your business has at the time. For example, if your overall initiative is to increase your brand’s email list, your goal for the giveaway should involve getting more emails. This will inevitably determine the type of contest you will decide to host.
What kind of social giveaway?
Retweet contest? Repost contest? Rafflecopter?
Deciding on what kind of giveaway you want to have needs to be based off of your goal for the contest. Retweet and repost contests are going to do wonders for your engagement and reach, but not so beneficial for growing your email list. With Rafflecopter you give the fans multiple different options to enter and it compiles all entries into easily downloadable data.
Another thing to take into consideration is whatever each platform is incentivizing at the time. So, if Facebook is giving precedence to sharing instead of liking, you will want the contest to revolve around sharing the post.
Whatcha wanna give away?
It may seem obvious, but just in case it isn’t, you need to decide what your brand wants to give away. At Parachute Media, giveaways for our clients are usually results of brands coming to us wanting to collaborate or they revolve around promoting a recent campaign for a specific product.
If no brand has asked you to team up, reaching out to a specific company that compliments your brand is also encouraged. The worst thing they can say is no, so put in the ask! 
It’s go time
Ready, Set, Post! After all necessary logistics have been put in place with each party involved, post away. Don’t forget to speak about the contest across all platforms, in order to reach as many of your followers as possible. Make sure you abide by your own rules. Stick to the set end time, announce the winners in a timely manner, and be punctual on delivering the gifts to the lucky winners.
Still overwhelmed with the thought of planning and executing a giveaway on your own? We’re here to help! Give us a shout and we’ll see how we can assist your business.
