Alan Rita — January 27, 2017 Launching a social media contest is one of the best ways to engage your audience. In addition to raising brand awareness, it also fosters loyalty among your existing followers. And as an online brand, giving back every once in a while is a fulfilling experience.
The good news is, there are now dozens of platforms you can use to run your own social media contest without a hitch. To help you scale your contests’ ROI, included are supplementary tools that can help you measure key performance indicators and curate user-generated content.
Without further ado, below are the top ten tools you need for successful social media contests:
Launching your Contest
First, let’s take a look at the tools that will help you plan, develop, and launch your social media contest:
1. Wishpond
Supported Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram
Wishpond is an all-in-one platform that offers a suite of online marketing tools. Of course, they also have a range of resources or “apps” for running social media contests and other promotions. These include apps for photo caption contests, sweepstakes, voting contests, and video contests.
Outside of social media contests, Wishpond can also help you design beautiful landing pages, opt-in forms, and automation workflows. It also integrates with third-party platforms such as Mailchimp, Salesforce, and GetResponse.
2. Interactwive
Supported Platforms: Twitter
Running hashtag contests on Twitter is one of the oldest tricks in the book. In fact, you can even launch your own small-scale hashtag contest without the help of any tool. But if you want complete control of your contest, or if you’re eyeing thousands of contest participants, then you should use Interactwive.
The platform works by letting you specify your campaign’s hashtag, set a running period, and measure statistics. You can also require participants to share a specific link or follow your profile first.
3. Rafflecopter
Supported Platforms: All
If you need a straightforward tool for launching a giveaway, then Rafflecopter is a great choice. As the name suggests, this platform specializes in running raffles that’s not dependent on any social media platform. This means you can integrate it with any site, as long as you can get your social media audience to participate.
To launch your giveaway, all you need to do is embed code on your website to activate the Rafflecopter widget. It also integrates with email marketing platforms, which enables you to leverage your contest for lead generation.
4. Woobox
Supported Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram, your website
Woobox is another comprehensive platform that can help you launch photo contests, sweepstakes, video contests, and more. It can also help you launch an “Instant Win” campaign, which allows you to specify a list of prizes and their winning percentages.
Tracking your Contest
The list above should provide you with more than enough options regardless of the contest type you have in mind. To ensure you’re getting the results you want, below are additional tools you can use while your contest is ongoing:
5. Followerwonk
Supported Platforms: Twitter
Followerwonk is a great analytics tool that can help you sort and analyze your Twitter followers. You can study your followers by location, who they follow, and who follows them. The tool also features a historical follower graph – making it easy for you to monitor your account’s growth over time.
6. Gramblast
Supported Platforms: Instagram
Gaining new followers is one of the most important objectives of running social media contests. That’s why you should consider creating a contest that only ends once you’ve reached a certain follower count. A great tool for this is Gramblast, which tracks your followers in real time. It also allows you to broadcast this number so participants have an idea on when your contest will end.
7. Experticity UGC Curation
Supported Platforms: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube
In addition to follower growth, another advantage of launching social media contests is the user-generated content (UGC) that comes along with them. For example, a photo contest that requires participants to pose with your product rewards your brand with free promotion channels. You can also aggregate UGC using a tool like Experticity and share them across digital touchpoints like email, blog posts, or even printed catalogs.
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