6 Pros and Cons of Social Media Contests and Promotions

These past few years, while scrolling through different social media platforms such as intro grammar Facebook, I have noticed just how many different companies have started making contests, giveaways, and promotions. It seems like this is a very effective way of marketing and a lot of businesses have just started to understand that fact. If you are also considering implementing social media contests and promotions into your marketing strategies, you probably want to know more about this and whether there are obvious benefits to it.

Well, obviously, with every marketing strategy there are pros and cons. Whether this move can be beneficial for your business is entirely up to you. If you do not mind the cons and if the pros seem valuable to you then go right ahead and start doing these contests.

But, before you do that, obviously, you will need to know about those pros and cons. Fortunately for you, you are in the right place, because in this article and specifically going to talk about the advantages and disadvantages of social media contests, promotions, giveaways, and other similar events/actions.

Pros

For a lot of companies, the pros easily overshadow the cons. But, it is still best that you read through this article 1^st before you make a decision.

1. It can bring you more followers

The fact is that a lot of people simply love three things. Especially when those free things usually come at an expensive price tag. Although, that does not really matter. What matters is that people are willing to do anything on social media is to even have the chance of a teaming a free product.

Today, to get the best out of these contests and promotions, you need to ask your followers to share, comment, tag a friend, and like the post. By pushing your viewers to do all of this, you start to get a lot more recognition for that certain post. Once they start tagging friends, that is when you start to get a lot more new followers.

Those new followers will also want to get free products or to win a contest, so they also start sharing and tagging their friends.

In other words, with just a simple post, you can easily get hundreds of new followers in less than half a day. Obviously, the interest of the people will depend on the type of product that you are promoting.

2.  Free promotion

Like I already said, you will need to ask your friends to share this contest. By sharing it, the fans increase their chances of winning that free item that you are offering. You are basically getting free promotion from all of your fans for almost no cost. The only cost is that you are giving away an item for free.

This shows is just how beneficial online giveaways can really be.

3. Leaves good impressions

People love to see companies that are willing to create these interesting contests which allow customers to earn a free product. Leaving a good impression is essential for any company. With these contests and promotions, a lot of people will start to appreciate what you are doing for them.

If you want your contests to get even more traction on social media, maybe you should consider buying votes on websites such as butvotescontest.com. With so much activity on your promotion, more people are bound to show up. There are a lot of people that use websites such as these to buy votes and to win contests for their prizes. It is a common thing.

4. Easy way to collect data on customers

These days, a lot of people are being careful on the internet when it comes to their personal and private information. And that is smart. All of us need to be careful about how we share our private things with the Internet.

Because of this, obtaining data about customers can be a bit difficult. Usually, they do not feel comfortable sharing their data with any website or company.

However, when they have to provide their information for a giveaway, contest, or any other type of promotion, they will do it. At least, most of them.

Obviously, you can then use this data to find out more about your frequent customers which will allow you to adjust your product or services to cater to their needs.

Cons

No matter how good a marketing strategy sounds, there will always be certain disadvantages that might affect your company.

1. Can make your products feel insignificant

One of the main disadvantages of regularly hosting contests on your social media profiles is the devaluation of your products or services.

What does that exactly mean? Well, people do love three things, but if you start to regularly do these contests, they can easily get bored with what you have to offer. This is usually a problem that only happens to smaller businesses. Customers can get bored with companies that have a smaller number of products or services they have to offer. Larger businesses do not have this problem because they usually have hundreds of different products available to sell or give away.

My advice is to you is to never overdo these giveaways because you might make your products seem insignificant even to your regular customers.

2. Temporary followers

Previously, I talked about how contests can bring you, new followers because everyone is re-sharing and tagging their close friends. But, not always those new followers are there to stay. They just want to try their luck and get the product that you are offering for free and once the giveaway is done, they will unfollow you.

At first, it does not seem like anything serious, you are not really losing anything, but you actually do. If hundreds of those new followers decide to unfollow you at the same time, that may have an impact on your online presence. Instagram or Facebook might push you lower on their ranking score.

As you can see, there are both advantages and disadvantages to contests or promotions, but I hope that this article will help you decide whether you should host one.