Get More Buzz For Your Social Media Contests With Rafflecopter

Many businesses are lazy when they think about setting up social media contests. They resort to the obvious and set up a rule breaking Like & Share contest on Facebook.

[Tweet “To run a successful contest you need to think beyond Facebook”]

To run a successful contest you need to think beyond Facebook and if you really want results you need to plan. As with any plan the first step should be to decide what you want to achieve.

Do you want:

More social media followers?
More interaction?
To broaden brand awareness?
To gain email subscribers?
To get leads?
To gather user generated content?

If your goal is 1-5 above it’s worth taking a look at this weeks cool tool Rafflecopter for setting up your social media contest.

Here’s how it works:

What I like about Rafflecopter:

People can enter multiple times. You can add lots of entry conditions giving people extra points each time they enter. This promotes more sharing from users.

It’s not just for Facebook. Rafflecopter contests can be embedded in your blog or added to a Facebook page. If these options don’t work for you Rafflecopter will create a page on it’s site for your contest that you can direct people to.

It helps you pick a winner. Rafflecopter has an inbuilt random winner selector. If you prefer you can view all entries and pick a winner manually.

It takes minutes to set up. Many of the full featured contest apps I use take a big chunk of time to set up. As you can see in the video above you can have your contest ready to go within three minutes.

What I don’t like about Rafflecopter:

The sharing options are what really makes this app but I have some reservations. Are we gaining valuable social media followers or are we just attracting people who like doing contests? When we ask people to share a tweet or pin an image are we encouraging people to share quality content or are we encouraging people to spam their friends?

The verdict

Rafflecopter is a neat little app for setting up social media contests. I prefer the email subscriber and social follow options than the sharing options. This way I’m gaining leads but avoiding encouraging spam.