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Your sweepstakes is an opportunity to boost your social media engagement. A sweepstakes boosted by a strong online presence is an effective way to make a reliable impact on your target audience.
It’s not only about posting ads with CTAs to attract sweepstakes participants, it’s about making meaningful connections with your existing and potential customers, all of which serves to boost your brands reputation both online and offline.
To help you get started, here are 8 best practices for running a sweepstakes to boost social media engagement.
Article Contents
IN THIS ARTICLE:
- How do sweepstakes increase social media engagement?
- What are the most important social media engagement metrics?
- How to get customers from sweepstakes participants
How Do Sweepstakes Boost Social Media Engagement?
Social media engagement measurement involves tracking comments, likes, shares, followers, audience growth, clickthroughs, and mentions.
As participants enter your social media giveaway, they will naturally engage with your postings. Ultimately, the greatest measure of sweepstakes success is an engaged audience.
Social media allows you to monitor and qualify the engagement of your target audience with your sweepstakes.
As a brand, it’s quality, not quantity that you want to focus on when it comes to social media engagement.
So a successful sweepstakes is not only one that attracts tons of participants but one that also:
- Gets shared with friends, family, and strangers alike
- Results in potential customers exploring and engaging with your brand website
- Converts to sales
- Gets inactive, existing customers to engage with your brand again
Want to design a sweepstakes to boost social media engagement. Get quotes for top sweepstakes marketing agencies by registering your free Premium Account.
12 Social Media Engagement Metrics to Measure for Your Sweepstakes
While it would be nice to just hope that your sweepstakes attracts fans on social media, the truth is that you need to give your followers a bit of encouragement first if you want them to start spreading the word.
Luckily, there are best practices that you can follow to ensure that you are on the right track.
However, before you get started, make sure that you have the right tools in pace to measure your social media analytics so that you can see what is working and what’s not in real-time.
Of couse, there is no one-size fits all solution when it comes to social media analytics tools. So let’s start with the most important social media metrics to measure for your sweepstakes.
The most important social media metrics for sweepstakes are:
- Reach
- Impressions
- Video views
- Clickthrough rate (CTR)
- Engagement rate
- Social share of voice (SSoV)
- Social sentiment
- Video completion rate
- Conversion rate
- Audience growth rate
- Amplification rate
- Virality rate
Before your sweepstakes begins, make sure that you collect benchmark data. This way, you’ll be able to compare your before and after results when it comes to social media engagement during and after your sweepstakes ends. This is how you prove that your sweepstakes marketing strategy is working.
Social Media Engagement Best Practices for Sweepstakes
Now that you have your set up in place to track your results, you are ready to create your sweepstakes marketing plan. Follow these best practices as you design and launch your sweepstakes campaign if you want to boost social media engagement:
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1. Monitor Social Media Analytics in One Dashboard
Having all of your sweepstakes social media activity in one dashboard will make it easier and faster to make data-informed adjustments to live campaigns. This will allow to maximize your results from paid social advertising which you should leverage as you grow your social media following organically during your sweepstakes launch.
On the same note, a campaign that isn’t converting to new sweepstakes participants, shares, and sales is one that you will be able to pause immediately so that you can redistribute the campaign budget, saving you ad spend.
2. Amplify Your Sweepstakes With Reach
Reach measures how many people have seen your social media content. Therefore, reach is the best indicator of the size of your potential audience. It’s in your best interest to make your reach as wide as possible, within reason and relevancy.
Determine what each social media considers as reach on each platform. For example, on Facebook, the “total reach” refers to the number of people who have viewed your Facebook post.
Not only does the type of interaction vary by platform, there are three different types of reach to consider.
- Organic Reach: Organic reach refers to the number of people who say your post in their feed. On many social media platforms, reach is limited. However, for platforms that rely more on SEO to bring in organic traffic, organic reach may be a valuable method to track.
- Viral Reach: Viral reach refers to the number of people who have seen your content as a result of social sharing.
- Paid Reach: Paid reach refers to the number of people who saw your content through a promoted social media post (social media advertising).
To make the most of your audience on each platform, plan out how you want to approach reach. A larger, highly targeted social media audience is the best way to ensure that your social media engagement KPIs for recurring sweepstakes promotions are met.
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3. Follow Best Time to Post Recommendations
The best time to publish is one of the most useful features of social media marketing management platforms. By looking at your historical social media data and analyzing the most optimal times of the day to post updates, you’ll know exactly when you can post to your followers.
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4. Respond Promptly to All Social Media Engagements During Your Sweepstakes
Don’t expect people to continue to engage with your brand if they don’t get any response when they contact you. Make sure that you have customer support available to handle any inquiries about your products and services.
You should chat with your customers and ask them questions about your brand. Conversational engagement personalizes the sweepstakes customer experience for your fans making them more likely to become loyal customers.
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5. Learn the Social Media Platform Algorithms
Not all social media platforms measure social media engagement in the same way. You should make sure that you design content for your sweepstakes campaigns that is known to boost engagement on that particular platform.
You should also keep in mind that the social media algorithms also consider your other actions on the platform when determining how much engagement your social media posts will receive. For example, on Instagram, your posts are shown more often to regular story viewers if you create Instagram Stories Regularly.
On Twitter, hashtags can increase engagement for Tweets and make them go viral.
6. Identify How Customers Engage vs Followers
Some people enter sweepstakes solely for a chance to win a prize. However, future customers are also among these sweepstakes participants. The key is to use social media engagement metrics to identify the differences between the two groups.
By doing so you’ll be able to automate entering followers who match buyer personas to into the sales process faster. Some characteristics of future customers to look out for in sweepstakes participants are:
- Leaving product and service reviews
- Sharing your brand content (branded content other than sweepstakes content)
- Reporting issues unprompted
- Sending you private messages or DMs
- Following influencers and brand ambassadors
- Tagging your brand in their social media posts
7. Be Personal in Your Sweepstakes Social Media Engagements
While chatbots are useful to for responding to FAQs about your products and services, your sweepstakes participants expect you to engage with them like a person. Avoid trying to sound like a “brand.” You need to show the audience that there are real people behind the sweepstakes and the brand.
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8. Social Listening Is Essential to Improving Social Media Engagement
Overall, improving your social media engagement requires understanding and responding to what your audience is looking for. If sweepstakes participants have valid feedback, don’t just acknowledge it, make sure to address them directly.
Make sure that your sweepstakes participants see how dedicated your brand is to delivering an amazing customer experience and they will be sure to spread the word about your sweepstakes.
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