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New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Want to know how to run a social media photo contest? Creating a social media photo contest online is a powerful way to connect with your audience, and using images effectively can mean tons of new followers, likes, and shares.
But what’s the best way to run a social media photo contest? This article will show you how to run a social media photo contest without the fuss.
Table of Contents
Running a social media photo contest is a good way to increase brand engagement and reach on social media. It can also help to collect user-generated content (UGC) that you can use for future marketing efforts.
Why are these contests so effective? Because they’re interactive! Your followers transition from passive onlookers to active contributors who produce and disseminate content. This active involvement allows for a more personal connection with your brand.
In fact, AdWeek reports that user-generated content posts enjoy a 28% higher engagement rate than regular posts. Additionally, they found that consumers find this content to be 2.4 times more authentic than brand-produced content.
This sense of trustworthiness can strengthen loyalty. Therefore, a social media photo contest not only widens your brand’s reach but helps you connect more deeply with your audience.
Social media photo contests are incredibly effective for generating a buzz around your brand on social networks. If you’re not convinced, take a look at the following brands that have seen great success with running social media photo contests for their business:
Running a social media photo contest is a lot easier with a clear plan. Follow the steps below to run your own social photo contest quickly and easily in WordPress:
Your goals are what you’d like your contest outcomes to be. Without them, you won’t know how to set up your giveaway or measure your results.
Your contest goals might look like the ones below:
When you’ve set your goals, you can decide how to meet them. Since we already know you’re running a social media photo contest, submitting a photo is the primary way to achieve that goal.
Yet, that doesn’t mean you can’t include other supporting contest entry methods. Optional entry methods might include one of the following:
When you’ve chosen your goals and entry methods, it’s time to move on to your giveaway prize.
All successful contests need a fantastic prize to attract participants and encourage them to enter to win. The best contest prize ideas combine highly desirable products with the fear of missing out (FOMO) to get maximum results.
For example, you could use some of the following ideas:
Next, think about your giveaway theme when you have a prize for your contest.
Creating a theme for your photo contest helps your fans get creative with their entries. Plus, it lets you gather user-generated content to help promote your product or service in the future.
Here are a few fun photo contest themes to get you started:
When choosing a theme for your giveaway, the key is to keep it fun, relevant, and interesting enough for people to enter. You can also follow up with a caption contest in the future, using photos you’ve collected in the past.
The example below uses the powerful topic of human rights to engage fans.
With the theme selected for your social media photo contest, the next tip is to think about which social platform you’ll use for running your campaign.
But before diving in headfirst, determine the most effective platform to promote your contest on. Not every social media platform is made equally, and each carries unique suitabilities and drawbacks.
A favorite amongst visually-focused brands and users alike, Instagram is a fantastic platform for photo contests. Its inbuilt editing tools and visually-driven interface make it easy for participants to submit their entries.
Moreover, the hashtag feature allows for efficient contest tracking. However, it mostly caters to a younger demographic, so if your target audience is older, a photo contest on Instagram may not yield optimal results.
With a massive and diverse user base, Facebook provides an excellent platform to reach a wide audience. It allows both image and text posts, giving you more flexibility with your contest rules.
However, its changing algorithms can sometimes make it difficult for your contest to reach your followers. So, it’s crucial to promote heavily either organically or with paid ads.
Twitter’s fast-paced nature makes it a prime choice for time-limited contests. It’s also excellent for viral potential, with its retweet feature. The downside is that its user base is more news-oriented and less image-focused than Instagram or Pinterest.
Pinterest is a great platform for contests that involve creating boards or collecting images since its user behavior is heavily skewed toward image collection and sharing. However, it may not be the best choice if your demographic is male, as the platform’s user base is predominantly female.
Weigh the pros and cons of each platform carefully, taking into consideration your audience’s preferences, your marketing goals, and the nature of your contest. By doing so, you’ll not only engage your audience but also edge closer to achieving your objectives.
If you want to learn how to run a social media photo contest, you’ll need the right tools. Luckily, there are several giveaway tools available. We’ve even analyzed the best tools in this Rafflecopter vs. Gleam vs. RafflePress comparison.
RafflePress is the best tool for running social media photo giveaways. And besides being the ONLY tool designed to work seamlessly with WordPress sites, it’s the most user-friendly tool on the market. That means even complete beginners won’t have trouble getting started.
RafflePress makes it easy to run any type of contest so that you can grow your email list, site traffic, and social media following. And pre-built giveaway templates help you craft beautiful contests without starting from scratch.
Even better, RafflePress lets contest participants upload photos to enter your photo contest in a few clicks. Then you can manage and view all entries from one central dashboard.
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If people can’t quickly enter your giveaway, they’ll give up trying. So when you’re adding ways for people to take part, you need to make it as easy as possible.
When building your contest with RafflePress, head to the Actions tab from the giveaway editor to see a range of easy entry methods. Each action takes only 1 or 2 clicks to complete, leaving little room to confuse people.
Here are the best actions to use for a social media photo contest to get more engagement and followers:
The Viral Refer a Friend action also lets you choose a custom message for users to share. That allows you to add branded hashtags to boost your reach.
As you can see, the methods above encourage people to join your photo contest and engage with your social media networks to follow you.
The rules of your photo contest determine who can enter and how. The rules for social media contests differ for each social network. So, you should create a clear set of rules to ensure people enter correctly.
RafflePress has a handy Giveaway Rules Generator to help you set and display your rules. You can use it to create a simple template added to your contest widget when you publish.
To set it up, first, create an online contest following these steps and customizing it to suit your needs.
Then when you’re ready, click Settings » Giveaway Rules.
Next, click the orange Generate Rules button.
Here you can enter the following details for your contest:
When you’ve entered your information, click Generate Rules. A standard set of rules and guidelines will populate the message area using your provided details.
When you’re happy with your rules, click Save.
The mistake many people make when running photo contests is publishing it on a page with loads of distractions. Ideally, you want people to hone in on your giveaway and take steps to enter right away.
But with a page full of information, images, and buttons to click, they’ll get distracted and might even forget about entering.
You can avoid this by having a dedicated giveaway landing page to remove unwanted distractions. Setting one up in RafflePress is pretty straightforward.
Find your giveaway in the RafflePress dashboard and click Edit.
Then head to Settings » General and find the Page Permalink heading.
Next, enter the parameters for your landing page URL and click Save.
When you visit that URL, you’ll see your giveaway displayed in a beautiful distraction-free environment.
Then you can include that URL in all your social media posts when promoting your contest, which we’ll tackle next.
The great thing about running a social media photo contest is you’re not limited to a single social network. Instead, you can encourage participation from all your social media platforms.
For example, even if your goal is to grow your Facebook page followers, you can cross-promote it to places like Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and YouTube.
Your fans on those networks might not know about your Facebook Page, so having them enter your Facebook photo contest makes them more aware and can increase entries and page likes. The same is valid for running an Instagram photo contest.
You can also promote your contest by:
Begin promoting your contest weeks before it goes live to get a ton of traffic and entries from the first day.
For more proven contest promotion ideas, check this guide out.
You’ll need to pick a winner at the end of your contest. The fairest way to choose a winner is by randomly selecting one, and RafflePress makes it easy to do this.
When your giveaway ends, head to RafflePress » Giveaways and click the Needs Winners link.
You’ll see all the people who entered and how many entries each has on that page.
To choose a winner at random, click the Pick Winner button, select your options, and click Choose Winners Now.
RafflePress highlights the winner instantly, and then you can click to email them and tell them the good news.
Lastly, mastering the art of running a successful social media photo contest comes down to learning from your results. What does this involve? Tracking the right metrics to determine your contest’s success.
Did you reach your engagement, audience growth, or website traffic goals? Tools like Google Analytics can help track visits and bounce rates, and MonsterInsights can help you add it to your site quickly and easily.
To measure leads and conversions, it’s worthwhile to don a detective’s hat and delve into stats from your CRM or sales data. Note your most engaging contest posts and those that didn’t get much participation. Social media platforms often provide these analytics.
Now, do a bit of detective work. What made the successful posts stand out? Was it the time of posting? The wording? Learning from your past successes is a sure way of enhancing future contests.
Next time you launch a photo contest, apply the lessons you’ve learned. Tweak your strategy based on your previous contest’s performance — practice makes perfect.
It’s crucial to familiarize yourself with the rules and regulations of the social media platform you’re using. Also, consider consulting with a legal professional to ensure your contest complies with local, state, and national laws. Always clearly state the rules, eligibility requirements, and terms and conditions of your contest.
You can use various methods to verify the authenticity of submissions. These include reverse image searches to check if the image has been used elsewhere, asking for original files that contain metadata, or requiring participants to submit a series of images instead of just one.
Make sure to clearly state in your contest rules how you will use and store participants’ data. Only collect necessary information and always comply with data protection laws and regulations.
Whether you can use the photos submitted in your contest for other purposes depends on your terms and conditions. If you wish to use the photos, make sure to clearly state this in your contest rules and obtain the necessary permissions from participants.
And there you have it.
In this article, we’ve shown you how to run a social media photo contest to grow your social followers, get more engagement, and drive traffic to your website.
While you’re here, why not check out the latest social media marketing statistics so you can improve your social media strategy?
And if you want to learn about other contest types, take a look at these tutorials:
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