Why Should You Run A Contest Online?

At first we should find what is contest?  Contest is a prize or prizes or sweepstakes to capture emails.

Reaching your market audience is easy when you run a contest online. Top 3 reasons to run online contests are to improve target audience, to build healthy email list and to boost social media fans.

If you want to run a contest nationwide and you should follow the guidelines of FTC, FCC and USPS.

Remember these things when you create rules for your contest:

You need to specify each and everything very clearly with your audience through guidelines section.

1. List clearly about the prizes you offer for the winners.
2. Do you have any alternative methods to join? If yes, please specify them in the rules section.
3. Exact time frame of contest starting and end time. When contestants join from different countries, you need to tell the exact time to avoid confusion.
4. Age requirements, state, country restrictions should mention in the rules section.
5. Winner selection method should state on the rules area. There are 3 types of winners choosing methods available online. They are: Selecting by judges, using random name generator and with votes/likes count.
6. The way you announce the winners. (Through email or phone)
7.  Show your team members, sponsors and employees list to build more trust.
8. When you want to run contest on social media platform and you need to follow their guidelines clearly.

Vital Points to Follow When you Run Contest on Social Media:

Recent study from vapulsemedia tells that 80% of marketers choose Facebook platform to run their contest. Are you running advertisements and contests on your Facebook timeline? It is totally wrong. You need to run your contests on Facebook fan page. Big brands recommend the same to the new business owners.

Never break Facebook contest rules. Don’t send messages or promotion to your friends and family to share the contest link. It is against the Facebook contest rules. Facebook application has great features to automate the process. So there is no need to add any external tools for simple polls.

If you still want to add more features, you can add tools like wishpond, woobox and Rafflecopter.

How to Select Contest Winners?

There are many tools available online to select contest winners. Simple sweepstakes run using a random name generator. It means, you need to give numbers to every contestant. If 200 people join for your newsletter, you need to give 1 to 200 numbers. Now you can use Google’s tool named “random name generator“.

Open and put minimum value as 1 and maximum value as 200. Now click random name generator and pick your winner. Take a video of your process to show your contestants. So you can get more trust from your fans.

If you run a Facebook giveaway contest on your facebook timeline’s post, you can use woobox’s free tool. It helps to select winner for your contest. Choose your post you want to select winner. Using this app you can choose 1 comment or multiple as winner.

Some contest creators use random names picker instead numbers. For those people, we recommend them to collect names carefully. Also ask contestants to put their full name so you can avoid same name issues. You can use tools like miniwebtool to pick random names.