Social media contests are a fun and effective way to interact with followers, grow your follower base, and build brand awareness. You can use them to generate leads, entice users to sign up for your newsletter, get more likes, and much more. But where should you host them? Facebook and Instagram allow social media contests (with some caveats, of course), but Google+ doesnât. That said, you can still mention your offsite contest on Google+. If youâre building a presence on any of these social networking sites, holding a contest is a fantastic idea.
Last year, Facebook changed its promotional guidelines to make it easier for businesses to hold social media promotions and contests. In the past, contests had to be contained within a tab. Now, they can reside directly on a business pageâs timeline. Other changes included the ability to use 
likes as a voting mechanism and collect entries by having users comment, like, post, or leave a message on the page.
While you could create a simple contest on your timeline â and follow all of Facebookâs promotional guidelines, consider using a professional Facebook contest app to create, administer, and manage your contests on Facebook.
Due to its photo-centric platform, Instagram contests revolve around photos. According to Instagram Help Centerâs âHost a Photo Campaignâ page, you should use hashtags to organize submissions to your Instagram contest. Ideally, youâll come up with a unique hashtag for your contest so that only those images specifically tagged with your contestâs hashtag will appear in the hashtagâs RSSfeed.
In addition to coming up with a good, unique hashtag, youâll need to create a webpage with the contests details such as contest length and deadline, prize, eligibility requirements, rules, how the winner will be selected, how the winner will be notified and so on.
Once youâve completed your contest page, the next step is to promote it. Options include pay per click advertising, sponsored Facebook posts, general Facebook posts, email, newsletters, and Twitter.
Google+
Google+ prohibits the running of contests and promotions on its network. However, according to its Contests and Promotions Policy, âYou may display a link on Google+ to a separate site where your Promotion is hosted so long as you (and not Google) are solely responsible for your Promotion and for compliance with all applicable federal, state and local laws, rules and regulations in the jurisdiction(s) where your Promotion is offered or promoted.â
Thus, if you are running a Facebook or Instagram contest, you could link to that contest on your Google+ page.
Running social media promotions on Facebook and Instagram is relatively easy. Make sure to follow each siteâs guidelines and consider using a third-party tool to create the most engaging contests possible.
