5 Social Contests to Increase Engagement and Drive Discovery

Every business needs customers to survive. But in order to thrive, businesses need engaged customers. Shoppers who engage with a brand daily are 2x more likely to make more purchases than monthly engagers. The easiest way to engage with customers and go viral is through social contests. Social media has become an inseparable part of consumers daily activities. Users are accustomed to engaging with brands on social through likes, shares, retweets and more. Social contests take it a step further to get social followers to become brand advocates and drive engagement, traffic and conversions. Engaged social followers are more likely to buy from, prefer and recommend your brand. Listed are five essentials for every business and how to achieve them with different types of social contests.

1. Brand Advocates

Create a loyal following for life with Instagram as your contest platform. With over 150 million users, 16 billion photos shared and 1 billion likes happening every day, this photo-sharing network offers millions of users as brand advocates. Instagram contests generate authentic fan product photos and ultimately, brand advocates. In this new age of peer to peer consumerism, these photos help users convert.

2. Product Discovery

For instant product discovery, flood Pinterest with a Pin it to Win it contest. Feature certain products or see which products will trend by allowing users to easily ‘pin’ a product to Pinterest for a chance to win it. As users pin your products, they’re populating their friends’ feeds, driving organic product discovery.

3. Social Reach

Facebook is your go-to social network for social reach. Facebook is the largest social network, with 1.3 billion active users. Facebook contests generate 3-4x more social engagement, with consumers 5x more likely to convert, on average. Shoppers log into Facebook at least once everyday. Use this contest to reach your consumers where they are.

4. Unique product galleries

Visually engage shoppers onsite and curate thousands of fan generated product photos through Instagram. With the same idea as brand advocates, unique product galleries will set your site a step above competitors. With real life product photos, consumers are able to relate to your brand and imagine themselves with your product.

5. Brand Awareness

If you want shoppers to really relate with your brand’s lifestyle, try an onsite contest instead. Activate your top influencers with rewards onsite to stay on brand and top of mind. Onsite contests create a community out of your loyal followers. These contests live onsite and have users directly engaging with your brand and products. The possibilities here are endless, enabling you to appeal to your shoppers. Run these simultaneously on social networks to further increase reach and discovery onsite and off.

Businesses are constantly looking for ways to engage users and get customers to keep coming back. Social has solidified their necessity as a crucial part of every marketing strategy. With competitors amping up their gameplans, will you try contests to fire up your followers?

via Business 2 Community http://ift.tt/1kUIIkW