So why is it a good idea to run social media contests on Facebook or Twitter? You’ll get a lot of eyes on your page and subsequently your business. You can also team up with other businesses to cross-promote each other.
Here are a few pros and cons to running contests on social media pages:
Pros:
- More people will visit your page. You can ask your followers to share your page in order to get even more people to see your contest.
- They are easy to promote. You can promote your contest both on the network that you are hosting it on and all of your other social media pages. You can also use contest promotion sites like online-sweepstakes.com.
- You’ll get more “likes”. Generally, on Facebook, you can’t require anyone to like your page in order to enter. But those rules don’t carry over to making that kind of request on a website or blog.
- You’ll get more unique page views on your website. People will come to your site for the contest, and hopefully will stick around to read your content and check out your business or blog.
Cons:
- While you’ll get more likes, they might not be quality likes. People may un-like your page when the contest is over. But if they like what they see, they could stick around.
- Social contests can be time consuming. You’ll need to cross-check entries with people who are now fans of your page. You’ll also need to make sure that people didn’t enter the contest more times than you would like.
- You may get rude comments when people find out that they have not won. You need to be sure to use a truly random way to choose a winner, if it’s a random drawing based contest.
Social media has become a huge marketing force for businesses. You can use social networks such as Facebook and Twitter to give away just about anything. You do need to be careful, however, to follow the contest guidelines that are set forth by the networks. If you don’t, you run the risk of your page or account being shut down.
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