4 Social Media Contest Ideas to Drive Holiday Shoppers Through Your (Virtual) Doors

Social media contests are much different from traditional landing page contests. The main distinction is the amount of time they take to create. Social media contests require fewer assets and time to build, leaving you more time to promote your contest and focus on other aspects of your business.The relatively low amount of time it takes to create and run a social media contest is why they are perfect to consider for your last-minute holiday promotions, and we have four ideas to help you get started.

Engage your customers with a comment to enter contest

Comment to enter contests are quite simple. You post to Instagram or Facebook, and your fans simply comment on the post in order to enter. Then, you choose a random winner from those entries. For the holidays, try giving away some of your must-have products or gifts on everyone’s wishlist as prizes.

Folks with successful comment to enter contests tend to promote the contest a few days in advance so their audience knows it’s coming. In our blog post, How a Women’s Clothing Brand and Home Store Used Instagram to Create Hype Around Their Anniversary Sale, ShortStack user ROOLEE mentioned that building up hype for their contest through posts and stories helped lead to its ultimate success.

Check out our guide on how to use ShortStack for your comment to enter contests.

Increase brand awareness with a hashtag contest

Hashtag contests require entrants to put in a little more effort. To enter, folks must post an image or video to Instagram or Twitter. Posts must be from public profiles and include the contest hashtag(s) in the caption. Asking people to enter by posting their user-generated content to their own profiles gets your brand and contest in front of your fans’ followers. This can drum up interest in your products and service from folks who haven’t previously been exposed to your brand, as well as generate additional contest entries.

Though not required, some folks like to create landing pages for their hashtag contests. These landing pages can help display entry guidelines, rules, and offer an additional method of entry. However, the most popular reason for using a landing page is to create a gallery of entries. This is a totally optional step, but it is a fun way to spread awareness of your contest and show off the UGC you have collected.

Learn how to set up a hashtag contest in ShortStack with our handy guide.

Spread the word with a Retweet contest

Like comment to enter contests, Retweet contests require very little effort from the entrants. In fact, all folks have to do to participate is Retweet the Tweet you indicate on your Twitter profile. That’s it. The beauty of Retweet contests, beyond their simplicity, is their power for spreading brand awareness and your exact marketing message across entrants’ networks. Be sure your contest focuses on products you know your fans would love to give or get for the holidays, and that information about those products is included in the message they are sharing.

Build your email list using a simple giveaway or sweepstakes

Okay, so a traditional sweepstakes or giveaway where someone visits a landing page to submit information via a form isn’t exactly a social media contest, but hear me out. Why not use social media to help promote a simple giveaway? You can link to the giveaway in your profile, post about the giveaway and awesome products entrants can win, etc.You can create a simple sweepstakes in minutes with our most basic templates. All you need to do is add an image, update a bit of text to fit your contest, drop in some rules and make sure the form fields reflect the information you want to collect. Once you’re done with the contest, you’ll have a list of folks interested in your brand for future marketing in the new year.

ShortStack's Simple Giveaway templateView and Create Your OwnSocial media campaigns are simple and effective for promoting your products and services during the holiday season. Your social media campaigns can go from concept to reality in a short period of time, which makes them perfect last-minute additions to your holiday marketing strategy. Unsure where to get started? Get in touch with our sales team or shoot us an email: theteam@shortstacklab.com

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