Social media sweepstakes/promotions are a great way to gain new followers and to expose your brand to a whole new market. When creating your sweepstakes/promotions your first order of business should be to decide what your objective is. You will need to decide if your objective is to obtain new likes/followers/gain email addresses/etc.
Once this is decided upon then your next order of business should be to decide what is the prize that you would like to give-a-way? Will you be giving away a large prize or several smaller ones. There are benefits to each thought process.
First for a sweepstake/promotion being run via a social media network with a large prize then it is best to run a 10-14 day contest. Anything longer then this and you will lose the interest of the entrants. It is a best practice to keep a large prize drawing to this timeframe to give entrants enough time to enter and to create a buzz.
For sweepstakes/promotion being run via a social media network with several smaller prizes it is best to run a 14-30 day contest. With the short turnaround time on awarding prizes you will keep the entrants coming back to your social media site to check for winners which will provide them with the opportunity to see your updates that they might not have been checking or seeing previously.
Now that you have your objective decided, your sweepstake/promotion prize policy selected, your next step is decide on what the demographic will be.
Once your sweepstake/promotion is off and running be sure to make note of the progress so that on your next contest you will have learned what has worked for you and what has worked for each client.
Good Luck.
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