Polly Barnfield, OBE, breaks down a cocktail-week competition that Original Shoes ran on social media, offering two sets of five wristbands as prizes. Small, easily winnable prizes drive higher engagement than big ones. She shows how to track performance across platforms with a single dashboard, monitoring hashtags, sentiment, and influential users.
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Today we're looking at how competitions can drive engagement as well as awareness on social media. Shrewsbury bed worked with the account Original Shoes, which is a guide to Shrewsbury, to publicize an entire area that the cocktail week was coming up. They did the original post and then they edited it to see who had won, which was a really, really great way to. As you can see here, the original post, the giveaway cocktail week, they're giving away two sets of five wristbands and then here they put who had won and edited it so that everybody knew that the competition was closed. And it was a much better way of doing it because it keeps the original engagement of the original post rather than having to do a separate one and building that up again. The great things about the competition are the image. It's a showstopper. It's very clear what it is and what it's for the mechanic, it was actually really, really simple. All you had to do was follow Original Shrewsbury, you had to like the post and tag FR friends that you would want to be taking with you to the cocktail event. So it's really easy, really simple and easy to follow. So there was less for people to do. You're not asking too much of people and it means that you're much more likely to get new people because you had to tag in friends. So it's people that maybe hadn't followed it before who now follow it now. Also what's great is because it's smaller prizes, so two sets of five wristbands worth £40. Although obviously for individual businesses that could come to a lot of money. For people that are actually doing a competition, it's quite a small prize, which makes it feel much more winnable. And because you can get multiples, it makes it feel like it's much more easy, I guess, to win. So they tend to get much better engagement than bigger prizes. There's something I would have probably done here is have tagged in a couple of the. If they had, they must have had Instagrams in order to. In order to have entered, I would have actually tagged them in so that they could have seen it and that they would have gone on and shared it as well. But either way, it's all amazing way of, I guess, creating more engagement and awareness of your event. Now, if I was these guys, I'd be wanting to understand a lot more about what social media was working for me and what wasn't. So I would go to the maybe dashboard, which is here, where you can obviously get things like your best post and you can compare it with anybody that you like and you can start to compare all your social stats. You can look at your most used hashtags versus what works for a competitor or someone that you're inspired by. You can understand sentiment. You can see maybe which customers or which other businesses have influence in your conversation. But what I think would be great if you were running a competition is actually as well to keep on top of the comments. So the amount of people that are commenting across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, you could manage from here and then the same with the mentions as well. So anyone who's tagging you, you can then keep on top of and make sure you go in and engage them. So it's a much easier way of managing a competition rather than having to go into all the individual accounts. Now, if you've got any questions whatsoever, please click on the little blue button here. We love to.
