16 key points to choose an application for creating contests in

social media

There is no doubt that online contests are an effective way to increase our online

audience and capture new clients. There are many different applications (apps) and

platforms to help us to organize our contest. In this post we will see the characteristics

and features we should look for in order to take the right decision, and ensure our

contest is a successful one.

- Multiplatafom. There is no reason to limit a contest to just one of the social networks.

The app should allow us to present our contest, not just on one platform, e.g. Facebook,

but on a range of platforms such as Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ etc. To concentrate on

just one social network carries with it a high risk, in that you are soley dependent on the

behavior a single platform.

- Don’t forget your website. Social networks are important, but your site is equally as

important, if not more so! We should make sure that our contest is visible and

accessible directly from your page. It’s very risky to concentrate all our efforts on a

third party website – even if it is called Facebook. An effective platform will allow us,

if required, to diversify and distribute our promotional efforts properly.

- Virality. One of the key elements in determining the success of a contest are its viral

properties. The application should allow the participants to share the contest over all the

social networks, and thereby encourage more users to follow us. To do so, the

participants in our contests should be encouraged, in a proper way, to carry out these

viral actions.

- Legal compliance and the various rules that regulate the social networks. Obviously,

the chosen app should allow us to comply fully with everything set out in current

legislation. (for example, specifying our privacy policy, contest rules etc.).

Furthermore, it should adhere to all the legislation covering this type of promotional

activity on the networks in which we will be running our contest.

- Different types of contest. We should not limit ourselves to running just one type of

contest, and as such, the chosen platform should, as a bare minimum, allow us to run

contests with photos, videos and texts. While these are the most common formats, in

other more specific cases, it may be interesting to have access to less common contest

formats (e.g. songs or other types of music)

- Ease of Use. The process to launch our contest should be quick and easy. The creation

phase of the contest should not last more than ten minutes, and should be suitable for

everyone, without the need of any prior programming skills.

- Accessibility via mobile platforms. Access to the Internet through this type of device

is growing ever more common by the day, so it is advisable that the application will

modify any content to be viewed on them correctly.

- Multiplicity of Contest and distribution methods. There are applications that will

charge for each contest, or other promotion, undertaken and often limit their display to

just one Facebook page. This system is very inflexible and could considerably affect the

final cost. A system that allows multiple promotions and distribution methods for the

same price is undoubtedly a favorable and more economical option.

- Choice of Language. If our publicity objective speaks of a greater range of languages,

this characteristic is essential. If not, we automatically reduce its chances of greater

diffusion and virality.

- Defining the target market. It is often in our interest to limit participation in a contest

to a predetermined country or age group (inclusive of any legal constraints that may

apply) The chosen application should allow us to do this.

- Anti-fraud measures. The contests will undoubtedly attract a rouge element with

fraudulent intentions, who want to manipulate the results and capture the prizes; this is

especially true when the winner is chosen by a voting system. For this reason, the

application should offer mechanisms to avoid any such problems, for example, limiting

the number of entries for each participant, requiring some form of registration or control

in order to vote, limiting the number of votes that any one person may cast, etc.

- Completeness of any information offered. The ideal contest should provide

structured, graphical and comprehensive details of the contest, including: a description

of the contest, full details of our company, a list of participants etc. This will increase

the transparency of our contest, and as a result increase participation. The application

we choose should allow us to present this information in a clear and straight forward

manner.

- Personalization. We should be able to adapt the look and feel of our contest to be

consistent with our brand identity. An application that claims to do this should allow

full access to the css file that controls all graphical and visual aspects of the contest.

- Exclusive ownership of all personal data obtained during the contest. We should

ensure that we retain exclusive ownership over all data collected during our contest, to

do so we should always consult any legal disclaimer offered by the owner. It is also

important that we have easy access to the data, for example, being able to download it in

an xml file or similar.

- Statistics. We should have full access to all the data relevant to our contest: number of

visits, number of and geographical location of the participants, impact on social

networks etc. It’s best if the application gets this data from a third party specializing in

this area (e.g. Google Analytics). This will allow for greater completeness, and of

course reliability, of any data collected.

- Preview. When we are configuring the contest it is important that the application

allows us to see how it will look before publication. This will allow us to correct any

mistakes and carry out any testing in order to be sure that the contest offered to the

public will look exactly how we want.

In a later post we will explain in more detail how HiSocial is designed to meet each of

these requirements, and allow you to run truly successful contests. For now, we invite

you to try it for yourself free of charge by following the link below:

¡Sign up for free and create your contest with HiSocial!

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