Contests are an excellent way to promote your brand and increase your social following. Unfortunately, creating and running a contest yourself can be headache-inducing and, depending on how you run it, could even be against the rules of a particular social platform. Instead of going through the trouble of trying to set up and monitor your contest through traditional social media monitoring services, there are many affordable and efficient contest services that can do the heavy lifting for you. We’ve found four great services to help get your Facebook, Twitter, photo and feedback contests up and running.
Rafflecopter
When it comes to easy-to-use contest tools, Rafflecopter is the most popular — and with good reason. Contest creators can set the number of times per day a contestant can enter, set the terms for each entry (e.g. tweet this contest, join our mailing list, etc.), quickly and easily generate the terms and conditions of the contest, and choose winners. Vital stats like the total number of entries is also available at a glance. It can be embedded into your brand’s blog or housed in its own Facebook tab (as illustrated in the Explosion Bus example above).
Once the contest period is over, it’s also a quick and easy way for entrants to see who won the giveaway (as seen in the GiftRocket example).
TabSite
You might want to personalize your contest page more than Rafflecopter allows. This is where TabSite comes in. We’ve mentioned TabSite in the past for its ability to transform a brand’s Facebook tabs into reviews apps or gift card apps. TabSite’s versatility also gives users the ability to dedicate an entire tab to a customized contest.
Interactwive
Of course, if you want to look beyond Facebook and conduct a Twitter-centric contest, there are plenty of tools to help you do just that, including Interactwive. The service allows you to set the terms of the competition, including the keywords, hashtags and URLs that contestants must use in the entries, making it easier to filter and keep track of all qualifying tweets. Users can also keep an eye on the total number of entries using the dashboard.
OneKontest
If simple retweet entries are too boring for your taste, you can also build more creative contests using OneKontest. OneKontest’s features make it easy to run a hashtag contest, a photo contest, a trivia contest or a even a feedback contest (customer feedback opportunity, anyone?). Just fill in the appropriate fields and customize it according to your brand’s needs, and your contest is up and running in no time.
Still haven’t found what you’re looking for? Why not try a Pinterest contest? Find some inspiration here.
