Running a contest on social media is a great way to capture leads and this is something I have been very vocal about.

I recently came across a great article from ShortStack who analysed the data of close to 1 million social contests to see what data brands are collecting, and what this means for the marketing industry.

The Study

In this study, more than 850,000 promotion forms that were built using ShortStack were analysed to find out the average use of which standard form fields were used the most by brands.

ShortStack also looked at their best performing contests that received the most number of entries. Here is what was most interesting

1. Email Addresses Are The Most Wanted Piece of Information

When it comes to running a competition on social media, there is a form that your entrants will need to fill out before they have been officially entered into the competition. How does this look for you? What are the key pieces of information that are most valuable to YOU?

When I run a competition, or give something away free of charge, I always make sure I get a name and email address. Asking for too much can be off-putting however, you need to utilise that lead which is why getting a name and email address is a good middle ground.

A staggering 94.7% of brands agree with my logic and use promotion forms to capture an email address with a further 79.35% capturing names. From the top 10 best performing ShortStack contests, 100% of them asked for an email address.

2. Less Facebook Focused Contests

As you may know, social media competitions used to solely “live” on Facebook. A business would run a content using Facebook with required features including “like the page” and “Login with Facebook” to enter.

Brands are now moving away from Facebook when it comes to running a competition. The study showed that brands who are running their competition outside of Facebook, they achieve a higher lead generation gain. Just 28% of the top 100 and 50 most successful competitions used the “Login with Facebook” in their promotion form. This drops to 24% for the top 25 competitions and decreases further to 10% for the 10 most successful competitions.

3. Offer a Relevant and High Value Prize

This might seem obvious, but for the best results, you need to be offering a prize that has great value, and relevant to your community. You need to know, as a business, what you target customer is most interested in.

Don’t think that you are going to get great results and a huge collection of leads from just a £10 product giveaway, unless it is a product that is extremely popular with your community.

If you are thinking of running a competition on social media, take a look at ShortStack as they are a great company which I have spoken about before, and mentioned in my book.

Social media contests can prove extremely successful if you truly understand your audience and what you want from them in return. Take a look at a case study from one of my clients and their social media contests on ShortStack here.