Using Social Media Contests to get More Website Traffic – Guest Post

The core idea behind using any social networking platform, such as Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest, for your business is to eventually get your visitors to check out your website and make a purchase. What makes social networking such a lucrative method for this task is that a certain percentage of your visitors will share your business with people they already know, leading to many more visitors than you could possibly gain on your own through other marketing approaches. Essentially, social networking platforms serve as a referral system, in which every visitor who sees your business refers so many of their friends to your company: for free.

In order to get visitors to share your business with their friends, you must create exciting content that makes the proverbial “referral light” in their brains scream “YOU MUST TELL EVERYONE ABOUT THIS!” While there are a few ways to do this that many marketing experts use over and over again, most people have learned to tune these marketing approaches out to avoid the bombardment of sales pitches. Instead of reusing the same methods everyone else is using, make your social media pages stand out by following some alternative strategies.

Contests/Competitions

One way to grab your readers' attention is to create contests or competitions in which your readers must participate in a group activity to win a prize. This can be as simple as offering free access to a product or service you provide in exchange for answering a poll question or as elaborate as giving out cash prizes to the best content, pictures/videos, or craft projects that your readers submit. In either scenario, the idea is to get your readers to keep checking back in to see if they've won (reading and commenting on your most recent content in the meantime), as well as sharing the contest with their friends.

Steps For Creating A Social Media Contest

1. Check the rules of a particular social networking site to see if you need to do anything special to your contest, such as disassociating it with the social networking platform or discouraging participants from creating fake user accounts solely for the purpose of participating multiple times.
2. Decide which type of contest you are going to implement (sweepstakes, polls/quizzes, photo/video contests, etc), the available prize you are going to give to the winner(s), the rules of the competition, and the start/end time of the contest.
3. Create a stylish landing page for your contest that will allow participants to signup and share the contest with their friends.
4. Share the contest with everyone you know and post links to it on forums, blogs, etc to promote participation. Once you get the word out, those people will tell their friends and the contest should spread like wildfire pretty quickly.

Once a winner is chosen, publicize the results by recording a video of the prize drawing (like the screenshot above), profiling the winner on the contest page or your website/blog, sharing some of the runner-up submissions, and/or publicizing your interests in future contests.

Article by: Kole McRae for Web Design Toronto

Think Entrepreneurship is going to do a little giveaway right now to show as an example! So here we go.

We love to thank our readers, subscribers, and fans of Think Entrepreneurship. This week (until Friday at Noon October 12, 2012 USA MST TIME), we are having a contest to win 4 free Think Entrepreneurship T-shirts and Think Entrepreneurship Bottle openers will go to all winners.

To enter the contest:

1. “Like” our Facebook Page and share this post with your friends (You can use the Facebook Share tool below this post).

2. Comment an any post on the Think Entrepreneurship website.

3. Post anywhere on our Facebook Page that you have completed all 3 tasks and tell us a few sentences about your business.

All contest participant’s names will be added to a drawing.

Winners will be drawn and announced Monday morning.

We appreciate you taking the time to enter the contest! NOW GO OUT THERE AND CREATE A SOCIAL MEDIA CONTEST FOR YOUR FANS!