Do you find yourself constantly running social media competitions to get more likes and shares? It's not a bad idea, but it is only a short term gain on an engagement metric level.
Like-and share competitions have been shown to be ineffective at generating conversions for your website.
Why are they so ineffective? According to research on the subject by HubSpot, people who enter these types of contests are usually just looking for free stuff, and they don't care about your business or product / service in general. They will enter the competition if there is a prize involved, but that doesn't mean that they will buy anything from you afterwards.
So what should you do instead?
A better way to get more likes and shares is by creating content that people want to engage with, not just asking for it.
This means you need a strategy before starting your campaign - what are the goals? What is the desired outcome? What are you trying to achieve with your content, and what do people need in order for them want it enough that they will share or like?
This may sound complicated at first but once a strategy has been established then all future posts can be created around this plan - meaning more likes, more shares and overall, more engagement!
Creating an effective social media strategy doesn't need to be painful. Here are a few key points.
- Know your audience. What do they like? How old are the people you're trying to reach, and what gender is most likely going be engaging with it (or not)? This will help in creating content that resonates well on social media channels where those audiences hang out!
For example if you're targeting a younger female demographic in the hospitality / retail industry then your strategy might include more photos of food or fashion because this media type resonates better than say written posts.
Creating a competition is not out of the question on social media but stay within the platforms terms of service to avoid your account being terminated.
To create an effective social media competition think about bringing your followers back to a page on your website so that they can provide their email address and other relevant information in order to not only allow them entry into this particular contest but also to give yourself more opportunities with these potential customers down line!
This is where email marketing comes into play in which is a powerful way to stay in touch with your customers and potential clients. I will get into this on another blog post soon. In the meantime, if you do not have email marketing software, you can check out ConvertKit or Flodesk.