Many influencers love giveaways, they give their audience a treat and generate tons of social followers for both the influencer and, if you negotiate the collaboration right, the brand. Nicola Snell, owner of Press Loft, has come up with a few tips to help you make the most of a competition on a social channel.
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HOW much?! Minimum prize values:
Some larger blogs and influencers with tens of thousands of followers will have “minimum prize values”. This means your products have to be worth at least say £500. (Often you can offer eg 10 x £50 items.) Smaller blogs, and influencers with less than 5000 followers, often don’t have minimum prize values but therefore the competition will reach a smaller audience.
Its important to consider that it can be cheaper to do a paid post if you have high value products to promote.
A few ways to structure a competition to Increase followers
1. Make someone follow you. So in order to enter the competition the reader needs to follow both the influencer and the brand.
2. Ask them to tag a friend in a comment
3. Repost / Retweet / Share
4. Add a hashtag in a comment based on your target keywords or certain key trends / dates
You might want to do some but not all of these – but as a minimum make sure they have to follow you to enter
So for example, you might want to ask the influencer to structure the competition like this:
1. Follow the brand
2. Like this post
3. Mention a friend or two in a comment with the hashtag #lovebrandname / #mothersdaygifts #cornersofas (try a keyword that is on your target list)
Partner up with other brands
I saw a cracking giveaway a few months ago with a range of baby products on instagram:
It was hugely appealing, the chance to win 9 amazing items, and it also got each brand in front of the followers of the other brands.
you can see they structured the post like this:
1. Like this post
2. Follow us @yourbrandname and all stores in the giveaway. (tag the next brand in the image) Just tap the image to see where to go next, and when you are back with us you have completed the loop.
3. Tag a friend or two in a comment below.
Another example – this time on twitter:
Even on twitter always Include a picture of the product they can win for maximum impact
RT (retweet) and Follow
Nice competition from Little Tikes here: https://twitter.com/LittleTikesUK/status/829263334381875200
Picking the influencer – Relevance:
Choosing the right influencer is critical to the success of a competition. Here are some things to consider when selecting an influencer:
1. Do they post regularly – a few times a week at a minimum
2. Is their photography good quality, or are their twitter posts auto- generated / made up of lots of retweets. You are looking for good quality, original content.
3. How many followers do they have – I would suggest over 5000 is a good benchmark.
4. If they have a website associated with their account then check their DA on www.moz.com
5. Engagement- If they have over 5000 followers you should expect a few hundred likes and comments on an instagram posts and a good number of responses to tweets that ask for a response.
6. Check to see if the responses look authentic & the influencer is engaged witht heir audience, if comments are all just hearts and thumbs up and there is very little dialogue with the followers then be cautious.
UTMs
Another way to get even more accurate data is by using UTMs. This is a unique URL for a specific campaign so you can directly track traffic from specific sources. There is a lot of great information in this article:
Reporting
A couple of good ways to measure the success of a working with an influencer on a competition are:
a) increase in your followers – don’t forget to take a note of your follower numbers before the competition starts! The followers you get may not always be ideal – they can include serial competition-ers (I think I made that word up – but you know what I mean). But you minimise irrelevant followers by making sure the social channel has good quality followers who are engaged. (see above)
b) referral traffic and sales from the social channel on google analytics during the competition. Again before and after stats comparisons are important here.
c) Number of shares of the competition post
d) Comments on the competition post
e) Number of uses of the hashtag
f) Any direct traffic peakss
g) Brand search peaks
I would suggest keeping a spreadsheet of this data for each competition you run so you can track the impact of competitions so you can work out the best influencers for you to work with in future campaigns.
