Winning online contests and sweepstakes is a lot different now that social media has gotten involved.

Gone are the days when online polls consisted of a few buttons on a website and users of the website selected the choice they wanted.

Nowadays, online contests and sweepstakes have shifted almost entirely for social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook. This has two very big effects.

Leveraging the power of Social Media

Social media platforms make it very easy to share or promote an event within a group of people.

Contest holders and promoters usually work by releasing information about a competition or sweepstakes on social media and then deciding the results or winners via popular vote.

This creates a great scenario for promoting the contests further because then the administrators encourage participants to share the contest among their friends to vote on their entry.

Use Facebook Social Media Platform Effectively

Use your existing Facebook fan page to promote your contests.

Because the old fan page should have super relation with good volume of targeted audience.

If you have a popular facebook profile with 500 plus friends and you can use that to get more votes for your contest.

Checkout the below image to find how to share any contest page link with attractive smart post.

Like groups on Linkedln promote business online, Facebook groups also work similar to it.

Use your original Facebook account to join on real quality groups and share your contest link to get vote.

For gathering online contest votes, we should do a search for vote exchange group on Facebook.

If you have own popular group and the chance of winning any online contests will increase.

You can simply share a video on fan page, profile and group because videos have the ability to catch more eyes than posts.

How to create perfect quality videos?

Hope you know about freelancing sites like freelancer and fiverr.

Fiverr has very cheap offers with good quality (value for money).

You have to find the best gig from many other gigs.

When you choose right gig you have to look the reviews and seller rating because there are many low quality service also listed.

After you choose the perfect gig you can order your service and get a video at cost 5 USD.

This is really cool. Right?

How Admin Choose Winners?

The popular contests have super admin to control and create rules for the participants.

They always choose winners by highest number of votes, likes and shares from real people.

Why they avoid heavily the fake votes?

To maintain their quality and to give the price to the right participant, they are applying high filters to ban fake votes.

Sometimes, they don’t show the voting counts so no one knows the exact volume of votes their competitors have.

This is really smart way to control fake votes.

To get real votes you should have high friends in your social media accounts.

So you can get more votes when you post your contest entry details on your wall.

Alternative Methods

One very popular means of getting a lot of votes very quickly is by simply buying votes from a service provider.
Many companies exist that offer votes for a fee; larger the fee, greater the number of votes you get.

These companies offer these services like voting on online contests, signing up for services via email, answering surveys, etc.

These companies have come up with many interesting methodologies to sidestep the spam and fraud detection systems set up by many social media platforms to prevent foul play.

For instance, these service providers send votes from unique IP addresses and often process them in small batches or in bursts, which more closely resembles how things naturally go viral on the internet.

If say, 5000 votes were to be processed instantaneously, the server would be quite likely to flag it as spam and disqualify those votes. Also, many companies try to avoid whole round numbers like 5000 for the same reason.

Conclusion

There are very few means to win these online contests with pure luck and no other help.

Thankfully, if you are willing to pay for it, there are methods than can ensure a victory.

Obviously there are diminishing returns here, so make sure that the prize is worth the cost of winning, and that is something only you can decide for yourself.

If you do make that choice though, good luck on your prize! And maybe now is the time to send out some friend requests on Facebook?