On the heals of the Super Bowl, lots of organizations are looking at running their own social media contests, such as the various types of promotions, sweepstakes and offers brands can run on Facebook and Twitter.  

Two of the most popular content models are quizzes and polls – which can be run on Twitter or Facebook, and photo contests, arguably the most popular type of social media promotion on Facebook.  This post looks at both, and also includes 2 short videos from a discussion I recently had with Tyler Pyburn, host at The Pulse Network (http://thepulsenetwork.com), as part of our ongoing video blogging series.

Getting started: Quizzes and Polls

Quizzes and polls are an easy way to get people to participate with your organization via Facebook and Twitter.  For example, we post simple polls on our various Facebook pages that pertain to topics or content featured in recent TPN shows.  Polls can also be a great way to gage the temperature of your fan base, where participation (and seeing what others think) is basically the prize.

When I looked at the use of polls and quizzes on Facebook last year for an article I did for Social Times (http://socialtimes.com/polls-showdowns-drive-brand-participation_b43740), I found that half of the top 25 brands on Facebook have some sort of poll or two-way contest on their Facebook page.  Smart brands use polls or quizzes as a simple way to engage – and to also start going down the path to qualifying prospects and even spotlighting related products on the way to social commerce.

Fan feedback can also be valuable to brands, especially for product planning in advance of rolling out a new product line, for example.  Feedback from social channels is not only authentic, but potentially in context if it is captured directly in the stream of conversations that are going on within a community.  It’s also easy to embed polls right on your Facebook page so visitors can vote on and add either a Like or a comment directly beneath it.

On Twitter, the model is more oriented to quizzes.  For example, you can send out a tweet saying that the first (or tenth or 100th) follower to tweet out the right answer to a linked quiz wins a prize.

Learn more about these two models by watching the segment below:

Facebook Photo Contests and Beyond

If the overall goal of social media contests is driving participation and engagement with fans, one of the most effective campaigns is a running a photo contest.  In fact, when you look at the most common activities on Facebook, uploading, sharing and commenting on photos has historically been at the top of the list. 

Facebook photo contests tap these behaviors by creating a themed contest where users can enter, promote and vote on their favorite photo or video.  Since brands need to use a third-party tool when running promotions on Facebook, a number of fan marketing platforms that include photo contest apps have emerged, including Involver (http://involver.com/), Offerpop (http://offerpop.com/) and Wildfire (http://www.wildfireapp.com/).

The beauty of photo contests on Facebook – like this good looking themed Valentine’s Day contest running on Offerpop: http://on.fb.me/yTQ2eA - is that when users come to vote (or enter), if you make it easy to also add a comment and share what they have done, you create a word of mouth effect, which attracts more participants, their votes and shares, and so on.

Learn more about the impact of well-designed Facebook photo contests by watching the segment below:

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About the Author: Allen Bonde is CMO at The Pulse Network, a co-founder at Offerpop and co-chair of the upcoming Inbound Marketing Summit in New York City at the end of February.  He tweets at @abonde