Top 5 online contest ideas to maximise social media reach

Social media is everywhere, and can be used for everything. When people want to find a new job, hire a new employee for their team, or even make some connections, they’ve got LinkedIn. When people are bored on the train, or they’ve got a few minutes to kill, TikToks and Instagram Reels offer up endless feeds of microform content and entertainment. Looking up old friends and family, and buying, swapping, selling, and generally finding like-minded communities of people is easily done through the various features of Facebook.

The point is, nearly everyone is on some form of social media at some point every day. That’s why social media has become such a battleground for companies when trying to make people aware of their brand, and tell their brand story. The use of social media for marketing purposes was something of a novelty in the early 2000s to a necessity down to your local mom-and-pop store by the end of that decade. Today, the use of social media to support your brand is a profession, with TikTok strategists and a broad ecosystem of influencers standing as undeniable proof.

While the platforms may come and go, and evolve, and fall in and out of vogue with different demographics of people, as a medium, social media is a natural amplifier for running online competitions. 

Social media platforms offer a natural medium for online competitions

The goal of running an online competition or online contest is not to just facilitate a giveaway. The purpose of an online competition or contest could be to better connect with your audience by encouraging them to submit contact details, such as their name, date of birth, and email, and opt-in to your newsletter, or to grow your audience and put more eyes on your brand or products.

The prizes, or the giveaways, are bait – ultimately, when you create an online contest, you’re going fishing, and if you want to run a successful online contest, you need to go fishing in the biggest, most active waters for your target users or customers.

Social media is exactly that: social. Everyone is connected. All the people link to all the other people somehow. In theory (and nearly always in reality), your existing customers will be connected to like-minded individuals who are not yet aware or bought into your brand. Shared on social media, an effective online contest with a suitably attractive prize has the potential to be viewed and interacted with by huge numbers of your target audience through shares, likes, and tags, which can in turn be built into the terms of your competition. How many times do you find yourself tagged in a brand’s post on social media by a friend, “For a chance to win, tag a friend in this post, and ensure you’ve both liked and subscribed.” When this is pertaining to a genuine common interest related to your brand, this can be a very effective method of growing your audience.

Across social media platforms, you can target any demographic of people

Just because nearly everyone is on social media doesn’t mean that certain demographics won’t favour specific social media platforms over others, and potentially use them in different ways. For example, if your audience is younger, they will likely use TikTok and Instagram more than older target audiences.

When creating your online contests and competitions to use on social media, which can be done easily and quickly through game creation platforms like Drimify, you should take into account what you already know about your target audience’s social media diets and habits when formulating your social media strategy. For example, is it more worth your time to push your social media contest on WhatsApp, or Facebook?

While a contest customised on Drimify will integrate across all social media platforms, you still need to put time and effort into promoting your contest for it to be effective. If your audience happens to be most active on Facebook, and this has yielded more significant returns for your previous campaigns than say, on TikTok, this is the social media format you should tailor your promotional efforts to in order to support your online contest.

What constitutes a social media contest

What constitutes a social media contest can vary from something very simple, such as a post on Instagram of a new product that people can have a chance at winning by liking, subscribing, and getting a friend to do the same, to more sophisticated, gamified approaches.

Being hyper-critical of that post and giveaway model of online contest, while it can be effective, it presents a couple of obvious stumbling blocks. Firstly, it’s easily gamed. A user can just ask their partner or friend to do the actions because they – already a fan of the brand or product – really want to have a chance of winning the prize. Some of the extra followers and their interactions with the brand’s social media account will mean nothing, as they have no genuine interest in their goods and services, and by extension, their output or content.

Easy come, easy go – the next stumbling block that comes as a result of the first one is that uninterested followers can easily dismiss and unfollow the brand who ran the competition in the first place. This can result in a giveaway that really didn’t gain a whole lot for the social media following of the company running it.

Top 5 examples of online social media contests

The post and giveaway model was, realistically, probably far more effective when it was first used, and social media was younger as a concept, but now it’s highly saturated, and people don’t like their feeds cluttered with irrelevant content, nor their algorithms skewed and warped outside of their preferred interests. With that in mind, the types of online contests and competitions that brands use, to be effective, need to be more appealing and more engaging. This is where gamification comes into play.

Gamification is the application of game mechanics to everyday contexts to motivate users towards desired actions or behaviours. In the context of online competitions, we’re looking at enticing users to sign up, subscribe, contribute, and generally take notice, and we’re doing this by offering attractive prizes, as well as triggering their hunger for challenge and competition, and in some cases, their need for social discovery.

While all online competitions should be shared on social media to give them the best chances of delivering on their targeted marketing goals, here are some examples of online contests that lend themselves especially well to social media campaigns. Each of these games can be easily customised to your exact requirements on the Drimify platform.

1. The Photo Contest for user generated content

This is especially useful for a brand’s social media strategy because it’s highly visual, highly appealing to consumers, and is a great way to source user generated content (UGC) for further marketing purposes.

The Photo Contest essentially asks users to submit photos to a specified brief in order to try and win a prize. If the prize is a holiday, maybe you’re asking them to submit their summer holiday snaps from last year, or maybe you’re asking them to get creative and get them to create an elaborate staycation photo shoot in their own hometown. If you’re a clothing or makeup company, you could be asking users to submit photos of looks they’ve created using your products.

Because the modern consumer is hyper connected, having access to an incredibly powerful camera, and mobile internet technology at all times, and because some demographics are restlessly documenting their entire lives as it is, this is an easy game through which to connect your target audience with a key message. Additionally, you can follow up the Photo Contest with a Media Gallery, and invite your audience to participate once again by voting for the winning picture. This gives you 2 chances to invite people to engage with your messaging, and 2 chances to invite people to subscribe and opt in to your newsletter, as well all the user generated content you’ll acquire to use in its further promotion.

2. The Video Contest to inspire your audience’s creativity

This is exactly like the Photo Contest, except it’s inviting people to use the video camera functionality on their phones.

Perhaps even more than with the Photo Contest, this online competition gives you a chance to appeal to your audience’s creativity, as you could ask them to shoot and edit a short film. For example, if it’s in the run-up to Halloween, the brief could be to recreate a classic horror scene, or if it’s in the run-up to Valentine’s Day, recreate a classic romantic movie scene. The possibilities with both the Photo and Video Contests are truly endless.

By incorporating either of these media contests into a series of competitions to promote a specific holiday, you’re also generating lots of user-generated content to not only keep promoting the games, but to keep promoting the broader campaign.

3. Spin the Wheel to give everyone a shot at the big prize

Spin the Wheel is a highly visual game of chance. It’s made up of a wheel that you spin with a number of prizes – whichever prize the cursor lands after you spin it, is the prize you win. With it being a digital wheel, you’re somewhat unlimited in terms of how many prizes you can offer, but to entice people to play, you should look to have one or two grand, high ticket prizes, and potentially have everyone at least win some kind of promotional code. The chance at the high ticket prizes encourages people to participate and potentially opt-in, while the promotional codes encourage purchasing.

The beauty of a Spin the Wheel is that everyone has a chance to win – they don’t need any existing knowledge of your brand, or even some expert level knowledge of your industry or niche. It’s as appealing to your more knowledgeable target customers as it is to the debutants.

4. The Quiz to reward the most knowledgeable in your audience

Who doesn’t love a Quiz? You can bet on being able to find at least 2 or 3 pub quizzes in any given town through the week, if not more, because people like to show how much they know. When applying this concept to the online competition, you can customise a Quiz to engage with your audience on the Drimify platform, and use video and audio as well as text in your questions, and have the answers be multiple choice, ordered, or open.

Using a Quiz for the basis of an online contest, assuming you’re including a single grand prize for the winner, will require you to enable the leaderboard functionality so high performers can see where they stack up. It may also be worth limiting play to a single participation per player, to avoid anyone cheating by playing through and learning where they went wrong.

Using a Quiz would be an especially effective online contest where there is a social currency to being knowledgeable within your niche. For example, with comic books, knowing who the next obscure big bad is in the post-credits scene without having to rush to Google carries a certain cache. Even the option to just share a player’s high result in an especially challenging Quiz gives the opportunity for your game to spread from your current community of followers to their friends and connections.

5. The Dynamic Path™: to create sustained engagement across a special occasion

The Dynamic Path™ allows you to create a multi-contest experience for your audience. Think about a digital calendar for the run-up to Easter, or Halloween, or even a sports event. You could have a series of contests to create sustained engagement with your audience, and customise them to help you achieve multiple marketing goals. By offering them multiple chances to win, they keep coming back, keep engaging with your copy, keep sharing their results, and keep coming into contact with that form asking them to opt-in and subscribe.

Gamified online contests deliver the best engagement

While there is no “best” online contest to use to achieve your marketing goals, offering gamified, more interactive contests is more effective at generating quality traffic and helping you to grow your audience in a productive way. Gamified online contests are appealing to target audiences, and involve too many steps to bloat your actual social media community with people who interact with posts but don’t then follow your content for the sake of a giveaway.

The examples listed above are just 5 broadly applicable possibilities, but the Drimify platform has several game engines that can be easily customised for you to create your own online contests and competitions, some of which may be more appropriate for your target audience and particular marketing challenges.

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