Social Media Giveaway Ideas: Increase Brand Awareness and Loyalty

Social media has become a hotly contested space, with brands competing for every second of attention. If you want to stand out among the crowd, then social media giveaway ideas may be the solution for you!

With over 34% of new customers being acquired through social media giveaways, it has become an effective tool in connecting with audiences while also creating awareness of your brand.

In this article, we discuss the top social media giveaway ideas along with the best practices to achieve your marketing goals and engage with your followers on social media.

Let’s get started then!

Why social media giveaways are essential for brands

Social media has become one of the most crowded spaces for brands to market their products and services. With ever-dwindling attention spans, it takes something out of the ordinary for people to stop and actually notice your product.

While short-form videos on the latest trends are a good way to capture attention, they often add little to no value to the customer. However, social media giveaways tap into the popular mindset of winning free goodies. When minimal efforts like a comment or a repost help you win a product you have long been dreaming of, it creates the perception of value and also boosts organic brand reach with the target customer base.

An added advantage is that customers engage with the brand while competing for a product they would like to have. They also become an enthusiastic sample audience that can eventually become loyal customers of the brand, thus helping you achieve your goal as a marketer.

Benefits of social media giveaways

Social media giveaways have become a part of most digital marketing strategies today thanks to the following benefits listed below.

Audience growth

Most brands struggle to organically grow on social media. This results in high expenditure on social media campaigns that may or may not guarantee the desired outcome.

However, social media contests give brands the unique opportunity to grow their audience across various platforms. It also allows for improved traffic to websites and online stores, leading to a direct correlation in terms of boosted sales as a result.

Engagement

Brands on social media focus on engaging with their customers, thus helping create memorable experiences in the process. Successful social media contests often encourage their audience to interact with the product in some form or the other, which leads to improved reach and visibility as a result.

The sense of competition fostered by such giveaways also helps create a buzz among audiences. The feeling of winning something often leads to enthusiastic participation and increased awareness through word of mouth, creating long-term impressions in the process.

Brand loyalty

Brand loyalty is worth its weight in gold in today’s competitive world. Customers who participate in social media contests often take an interest in understanding and aligning themselves with the brand in the process. This can help build long-term loyalty that can be essential in gaining an intangible competitive edge over your rivals.

Popular Social Media Giveaway Ideas

Here are the most popular social media ideas that you can take inspiration from while designing your own giveaway campaign!

Comment-to-Win Giveaways

Comment-to-win giveaways usually pose a question to the audience regarding a particular brand or product, asking for customer opinions about the same. For example, a ketchup brand can ask its customers “Which food item is complemented best by our brand of ketchup?”

Comments from the participating audience can then be chosen at random and be given prizes for the same.

Best for: Collecting data about your brand/product while creating awareness

Like-and-Share Contests

In like and share contests, participants are encouraged to like and share certain stories or posts created by the brand. It may also require participants to then follow the social media page of the brand to be eligible for the social media giveaway, which is decided randomly.

Best for: Improving brand awareness and creating a viral effect to grow followers

Photo/Video Contests

Photo/video contests are a great way to bring out the creativity of your audience. By posting content that adheres to a set of rules, participants can come up with creative ways of product placement and promotion. The winners can then be decided on the basis of the most likes or with the help of qualified judges.

Best for: Engaging with customers while creating authentic and innovative content

Caption Contests

Caption contests often encourage participants to showcase their witty side with regard to a particular post or story. This can help you understand the various brand perceptions that exist in the market, making it a great exercise in market research as well.

Best for: Lighthearted content creation that promotes engagement through comments

Polls and Surveys

The tried and tested method to engage with your audience, polls and surveys utilize questionnaires to gather data and opinions. This could be about a particular product or about recent brand interactions, helping you collect a wealth of data that can be analyzed for future decisions.

Best for: Involving target audiences in decisions regarding new product launches while engaging with them

Platform-Specific Contest Ideas

It is important to cater your social media giveaway ideas to the strength of the platform on which you promote them. Here are some popular ideas that are platform-specific and will help you create a buzz on the respective platform.

Instagram

Hashtag challenges

Create branded hashtags that are unique to your brand or product, which can then be used across posts, stories and reels. This helps improve discoverability through user-generated content, while also creating opportunities for your brand to go viral in the process.

Quick tip: Create a memorable hashtag that people easily remember and uniquely associate with your brand

Tag-a-friend contests

Tag-a-friend contests often encourage an existing customer base loyal to the brand to tag followers on particular posts/stories to share their experiences with the brand. This helps create a chain that helps grow your audience exponentially, increasing your reach as well in the process.

Quick tip:Create memes or quirky posts that are light-hearted in tone that people would like to share either in personal messages or through tags in the comment section

Facebook

Page likes giveaways

Page likes giveaway ideas often create a buzz on social media by offering the chance for people to win goodies just by liking a page and a particular post. The simple engagement often helps increase participation on platforms like Facebook.

Quick tip: Target older audiences that are less tech-savvy for page likes giveaways.

Group-based contests

Facebook groups are a great way to push niche brands that focus on very specific aspects. Creating a mini-quiz or content-sharing activity can help create better awareness among group members, helping you convert them into customers in the long run.

Quick tip: Curate content and activities that are suitable for the demographic of the Facebook group

Twitter

Retweet-to-win contests

Similar to Instagram hashtags, retweets on Twitter help boost engagement and create brand awareness for a wider audience. Participants can be asked to retweet the post to stand a chance to win brand goodies or vouchers, giving them the right incentive to do so.

Quick tip: Create content that adds value to the target audience while also promoting a particular product

Trending hashtag giveaways

Participants can utilize popular hashtags that are currently trending on Twitter to help your brand with real-time marketing. This will also help your brand associate with relevant hashtags that are already trending on Twitter.

Quick tip: Make sure the hashtags you are using to promote your brand are relevant to your products and overall brand messaging

Steps to Create Successful Social Media Giveaways

Define Clear Goals

Determine the purpose of your social media giveaway campaign. This will help you easily identify and target the right audience accordingly. Your goals could include

• Increasing social media followers
• Generate new leads for your website/e-store
• Spread and improve brand awareness
• Retain existing customers

Know Your Audience

Social media giveaway ideas must curated in a manner that they are relevant and fun for your target audience to engage in. This will help you plan the methods of entry as well as the duration of the campaign, allowing you to improve the success of your campaign as a result.

Choose the Right Platforms

Once you know the audience you are targeting, you will be able to choose the most viable social meedia platform for your social media contest. This will help you improve engagement and participation, allowing your campaign to gain more impressions as a result.

Select Attractive Prizes

No social media giveaway will succeed unless there is an attractive reward at the end of it. Understanding the most popular gift items that work for your demographic will help you choose a product that resonates with your audience, improving participation and engagement as a result.

Craft Clear Rules and Guidelines

Social media giveaways can be hotly contested, especially if guidelines and rules are vague. Participants may discover legal loopholes that create liabilities for your brands which can even be legal.

Be careful to draft rules and regulations that clearly state what is expected of participants and explain how the winners are chosen. This will increase the authenticity of your giveaway and reduce the chance of any conflicts down the line.

Promote Your Giveaway Effectively

Every giveaway requires a good social media campaign that informs your target audience and encourages participation. Emphasize the gift you will be giving away and ensure that it resonates well with those you are encouraging to participate. Also, create high quality content that can be pushed across various methods across the platform to increase visibility and reach.

Common Mistakes to Avoid

While social media giveaways are relatively simple to implement, there is always the chance that they may backfire. Here are some common mistakes you must avoid while conducting social media contests for your brand.

Ignoring platform-specific rules

Most platforms have specific rules and guidelines regarding social media contests and giveaways to protect the rights and interests of the users on the platform. Be sure that your contest is designed to adhere to these rules.

Failing to do so can lead to warnings or legal action from users and the platform itself. It could also lead to your brand being banned from the social media platform, undoing years of social media marketing efforts in the process.

Offering irrelevant prizes

While brainstorming new social media giveaways, ensure that your gifting ideas are relevant to both the target audience and your brand. Create the opportunity for your audience to interact with your brand and its products, avoiding prizes like cash gifts or low-quality items that have no relevance to your brand.

If your audience feels like they have been duped or taken advantage of during the contest, they may resort to the same platform as the giveaway to express their dissatisfaction. This can lead to negative popularity for your brand which can cause a lot more damage to your reputation as a result.

Overcomplicating the entry process

Remember, the attention span of your target audience on social media is extremely low. Keeping things simple is the key to increasing your engagement with customers on social media.

Make sure to advertise your giveaway on the relevant social media platform clearly. Design the entry process such that it is a one or two-step process that does not inconvenience your customer in any way. This will allow them to participate in the contest before they change their mind, allowing you to interact with the customer as a result.

Measuring the Success of Social Media Giveaways

Social media giveaways are a marketing strategy to help improve engagement and reach. Here are the key metrics that you must track to help you measure the success of social media contests.

Key metrics: Reach, engagement, and conversions

Reach:Describing the number of unique users who have seen the content, reach is important to measure brand visibility. It gives you an accurate estimate of how many people are actively viewing your content. This can be boosted through hashtags and collaborations with social media influencers.

Engagement:When users like, share, comment and click on your content, they effectively increase engagement. This metric is crucial to understand if the audience viewing your content actually values the content you have to offer. It also helps push your content on social media algorithms as a result.

Conversions:Conversion is the most important metric as it showcases just how many users have actually ended up purchasing the product or interacting with other features of the brand such as their website. Having clear calls to action and following up with participants can be crucial in improving this metric.

Leveraging feedback and user-generated content

Most social media giveaways are not just about conducting contests and engaging with the audience during the competition phase. Successful brands deepen engagement by repurposing user-generated content at later stages to help remind customers of the contest. Another effective strategy is to seek active feedback regarding the contest and the brand to participants who have actively participated. This helps you get crucial insights that can help you tweak your social media strategy down the line.