Running social media competitions is brilliant for attracting and engaging audiences, growing awareness, and increasing purchase intent from your audience. Competitions can also be used to build email lists, drive traffic to your website, and build brand loyalty through rewards.
So what do you need to do to plan, create, and run successful social media competitions? Here are our top tips.
You also need to decide whether you’ll be giving away one prize, or a few for runners-up too. Offering a selection of prizes , like with the above example, is a great way to involve other businesses. Involving other businesses is a great way to increase the reach of your competition. It’s also an effective way to engage new audiences, and also to align your brand with others.
Brands running larger social media competitions may also choose to develop a bespoke microsite to host their competition. This is necessary if you want to collect email addresses and other data.
The Prize
Securing a prize is the first, and arguably the most important thing you need to do. It needs to be appealing enough to catch your audience’s attention and make them want to enter. The prize should be one of your products or rooted in your brand in some way. For example, a gym could give away workout clothes. Here’s an example from Serious Pig and Square Root who teamed up for this giveaway.
The Mechanic
There’s one hard and fast rule here: keep things simple. Overly complicated competition mechanics will put people off. Keeping it simple will maximise the number of entries you will get for your competition. Here are some of the most common mechanics:- Ask users to engage with a post by liking or commenting. This can be particularly effective on Facebook and Instagram. It will mean your competition post is more likely to be favoured by the algorithm, which looks for content that is generating discussion.
- When running an Instagram competition in partnership with another brand, ask entrants to follow both of your accounts. This is a great way to grow your audiences and is a simple step for entrants to take.
- Ask entrants to use a competition hashtag. This is a common mechanic on Twitter and on Instagram.


Limiting Entrants
If you need to make sure only relevant people enter then you could also use a more complicated mechanic. Broadwick Live teamed up with The Hoxton to give away a much-coveted mentorship with Alana Leggett. They needed to be sure the winner would benefit from the prize so asked users to submit which artist they would rebrand and how. This is a much larger task, deterring non-serious entrants, and enabling them to choose a winner which provided quality content.What Not to Do…
There are some entries mechanics you must avoid. The following competition mechanics violate terms and conditions.- Sharing a post or @tagging friends on Facebook.
- Entrants tagging themselves in an Instagram photo in which they do not appear.
- Retweeting content multiple times on Twitter e.g., “whoever Retweets this the most wins”.
- Requiring people to save a specific image or allowing more than one entry per person on Pinterest.