New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Introducing RafflePress's new leave-a-review giveaway actions. Boost customer engagement and build trust effortlessly by incentivizing reviews in WordPress.
New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Looking for an easy way to boost your website, email, and social media subscribers? Since video is such a popular medium, running a video contest is one of the best ways to drive your business’s viral growth.
Yet generating video contest ideas that excite and engage your audience isn’t as easy. So we’ve done the research and compiled a list of the top ideas to make your next video contest a viral success.
But first, what is a video contest?
A video contest is a type of giveaway that asks users to perform an action via video to enter a prize draw. You can run a video contest on almost any social media network, such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and YouTube. They’re also easy to run on your business website.
Video contests are an excellent way to…
They can also help with improving social media engagement and sending viral traffic to your website.
Video contests are basically viral by nature due to how engaging and attention-grabbing they are.
Plus, if your video contest has a voting stage, everyone who enters has a huge incentive to share your contest with friends to secure more votes. That means they’re doing the work for you, bringing you free traffic, subscribers, and new potential customers.
Bottom line: Video contests are an effective way to get more subscribers because it’s easy for them to go viral.
Now that you know the purpose of this type of contest, let’s explore some video contest ideas so you have the inspiration needed to create one for your business.
TikTok is fast becoming the social media network of choice for short, actionable video clips. With over 800 million active users, it’s making headway on the likes of Instagram and Facebook and has already surpassed Snapchat.
The great thing about these videos is that they’re short enough to keep peoples’ attention and highly shareable, resulting in easy viral content. With that in mind, running a TikTok video contest is an easy way to attract more visits and subscribers from a young demographic.
To run a TikTok dance challenge contest, you can either create your own dance sequence for people to follow or use one of the many examples already out there and ask users to send their videos for a chance to win a prize.
The easiest way to set the contest up is to host it from your business website using a contest app like RafflePress, the best WordPress giveaway plugin. This will ensure you generate more traffic as well as subscribers.
With ready-made giveaway templates to grow your social following and email subscribers, getting started takes only a few clicks.
Then you can add easy ways for people to enter and earn bonus entries with pre-built entry actions that require users to subscribe to your newsletter, follow you on Twitter, visit your YouTube channel, and more.
For participants to submit their TikTok videos, you can use RafflePress’s Invent Your Own entry action. Simply rename the action and tell users to leave a link to their TikTok video to enter.
Drawing a winner is just as easy. You can use the random winner picker included with the RafflePress plugin, judge the contest yourself, or ask your followers to vote for the best video.
What’s more, once the contest is over, you’ll have tons of user-generated content (UGC) to use for future campaigns (with the owner’s permission).
Hashtag challenge contests are another type of video contest with the power to make your business go viral. That’s because hashtags are highly searchable, clickable, and used on many different social media platforms.
Hashtags help people discover interesting content and help brands connect with people searching for that content, such as products, services, articles, and even newsworthy topics.
Many brands create branded hashtags to improve their discoverability. Often they use a combination of their brand or product names with more popular hashtags.
For instance, if we wanted to make a branded hashtag to use on Instagram, we might combine part of our brand name, “Raffle” with a popular Instagram hashtag like “gram” to create the branded hashtag of “#RaffleGram.”
Running a hashtag video contest is an excellent way to amplify the reach of your branded hashtag. You can set a challenge for your audience like:
And get participants to send you the video for a chance to win your grand prize.
Like the previous example, you can create your giveaway with RafflePress and use the Invent Your Own entry action to gather entries.
You can also include the Refer-a-Friend action to get participants to share your contest using your branded hashtag.
The more people that use this action, the more entries you’ll receive, and the more visible your brand will be on social media.
Another great video contest idea is to use sports events to capture the attention of your audience. It could be something widespread like the Olympics or Wimbledon or something local, which will help you target an audience in a specific location.
You can run a video contest to win tickets to the next local game or even merchandise related to the event. Just make sure the prize you offer is something your audience wants and is related to your brand.
To enter, you can ask people to send goal celebration videos, basketball tricks, or even a video of them crossing the finish line of a race. And to boost your social media subscribers, you can offer bonus entries for users who choose to follow you on those platforms.
Most people have a hidden talent, even if they’re humble and don’t tend to brag about it. So why not celebrate your audience and discover new, interested followers by hosting a video talent contest.
Try to theme your contest around a topic relevant to your brand.
For example, food brands could run a cake decorating contest. Users can send in a time-lapse video of the process to enter, with the winner chosen based on the best cake.
Here are a few more ideas for running a video talent contest:
Consider adding the Join an Email Newsletter entry action included in RafflePress as a bonus entry.
Not only will this boost your email subscribers, but it’ll also help you stay in touch and engage with users after the contest ends.
This type of video contest is especially popular on YouTube and Instagram. The premise is you post a video announcing that if people help you reach a specific number of subscribers, you’ll complete a dare and reward a lucky winner with a prize.
The dare is usually something funny or embarrassing, like getting your chest hair waxed by a friend or cutting your lawn with a pair of nail scissors. But you’d be surprised to learn that it works because it creates anticipation that’s hard to resist.
If you’re going to run this video contest idea, try to avoid using clickbait titles and promising a dare you can’t follow through with. This would just create bad feelings and put people off the idea of helping you reach your goal. Instead, make sure it’s exciting enough to generate interest but be realistic.
You can also ask your audience what they’d most like to win so you can offer a prize that’s more desirable (as long as it’s within your budget).
It’s no surprise that since videos’ rise in popularity, Facebook has upped the ante on its use of video content. Not only is it easier to add video content to Facebook, but you can also broadcast live, which is an excellent way to engage with your audience in real time.
Another handy trick you can do with Facebook videos is to run a poll, which is another useful way to engage and know more about your audience.
You can run a video poll on Facebook with both live and standard news feed videos.
All you need to do is upload your video, then click the Edit Post option from the dotted menu in the right-hand corner.
Then in the video editing options, scroll to the Polls section and click the Create Poll button.
After that, you can provide your poll question and include answer options. You can also choose where the poll is shown in your video.
To turn your Facebook video poll into a contest, you can create an online contest on your website using RafflePress and choose View a Facebook Post/Video as the main entry requirement, with bonus entries for visiting your page.
Caption contests aren’t just limited to Twitter and standard photos. You can create a video caption contest for almost any platform and ask users to comment with their best captions to win a prize.
The Art Assignment took a different approach to their caption contest by asking users to caption a painting.
In your video, clearly explain your contest’s rules, how users can enter, and the grand prize.
You can collect submissions for the contest using the Invent Your Own action in RafflePress. Just get users to leave their caption in a comment and enter the link to their comment to verify the entry.
As mentioned earlier, UGC is content created by your audience, and when the content is about your product, service, or brand, it’s pretty powerful promotional material. That’s because testimonies from actual customers tend to be more authentic and trustworthy, which improves the likelihood of people giving your brand a try.
You can run a UGC video contest in many ways. For example, you can ask users to:
You can then draw a winner based on the best submission or randomly draw a winner to keep things fair.
If you try this video contest idea, make sure you promote your contest using your branded hashtag to improve its reach and visibility.
Getting honest feedback about your products and services helps you know where your business needs improvement and how to keep your customers happy. It’s also a great way to learn about the opinions and tastes of your audience.
For this video contest idea, you can ask users to submit their feedback about your brand via video. As a reward for taking part, you can enter users into a prize draw and feature the best feedback on your social media channels and website.
It’s best to provide a few questions to prompt the type of feedback you need. For instance, you could ask users what they think the benefits of your products are or how they’d improve them.
Reaching a certain follower goal is an excellent opportunity to celebrate. After all, it’s hard work trying to build a loyal and engaged following. So why not give your audience a chance to celebrate with you by running a video contest.
One way to do this is to ask users to submit celebration videos in return for entry into your prize draw.
Alternatively, you can create a video yourself and get users to share it with their followers for a chance to win.
RafflePress makes this video contest idea super-easy. Simply add the viral Refer-a-Friend entry action for users to share your contest on:
You can also add extra actions to follow you on those platforms for bonus entries. Then drawing a winner is as simple as using the built-in random winner picker.
Another take on a standard UGC video contest is a video contest idea that asks users to submit video tutorials as a giveaway entry.
Not only is this a great way to learn how well your audience knows your products, but it’s also an opportunity to teach potential customers the many ways they can use your goods.
You can even use video tutorial contests to involve your local community. For instance, Friends of Lakemore held a children’s sandwich-making contest, with the winner receiving a $25 Amazon gift card.
While they judged the contest based on the number of likes each submission received, you could run a follow-up contest in RafflePress, asking users to vote for their favorite using the Surveys and Polls action.
If your business generates a lot of content for its users, coming up with useful ideas for your audience can be tricky. One way to overcome that issue is to ask.
Run a video contest, asking people which topics they want you to cover. They can send their ideas with a simple video, or you can spice things up by asking them to show examples in their clips.
The best ideas could receive a relevant prize, with the bonus of knowing their ideas have helped shape your content creation strategy.
The shift in seasons isn’t just the perfect opportunity to dust off your seasonal promotions, but it’s also the best time to run a video contest. Many consumers have come to expect contests and giveaways during the holidays, so chances are they’ll already be keeping an eye out.
You can make your holiday video contest ideas as creative as you like. You could ask your followers to send a clip singing a Christmas song while wearing their ugliest Christmas sweater. Or you could get them to demonstrate their best Easter Bunny impression.
Try to keep things fun, engaging, and relevant to your business. It’s also a good idea to start promoting your contest weeks before it goes live to generate tons of excitement.
Chances are, we’ve all got a funny or embarrassing home video that never sees the light of day. The truth is that these videos can be comedy gold and an excellent source of user engagement.
For your next video contest idea, run a giveaway asking users to submit their funniest home videos on a topic related to your company.
Fashion retailers could ask for school play recordings demonstrating your homemade costumes. In contrast, pet stores could ask for hilarious clips of your furry friends.
The last of our video contest ideas is probably the most valuable in terms of customer engagement and growing your subscriber base. Instead of running one-off giveaway contests, why not make it a regular feature?
Regular contests give users something to anticipate and look forward to. It also gives you room to experiment with different contest types to see which works best.
BlackBoxMyCar runs a monthly video contest where participants share the fantastic views their dashcam captures during the month. The winning video gets either $150 credit towards their next in-store purchase or a $50 Amazon gift card.
While this brand asks users to submit their footage via their online form, you can make it easier with RafflePress.
Just use the Invent Your Own entry action and ask users to post the link to their video. That way, you can offer bonus entries for joining your email list, sharing the contest with friends, etc.
That’s it!
We hope this article gave you plenty of video contest ideas to skyrocket your subscribers and YouTube likes. Now all that’s left is for you to create one yourself with RafflePress, and enjoy how viral contests can grow your business.
For another valuable contest idea, click here to learn how to run a referral contest to boost your business.
And if you liked this article, why not follow us on YouTube for more helpful giveaway tips? You can also find us on Facebook and Twitter. See you there!
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Fantastic news Katrina!