The holiday season is upon us. It’s a frantic time of the year for brands as online marketing efforts peak during this period. With so much competition for both organic and paid traffic, brands need to think outside the box to ensure that they can generate buzz and achieve maximum ROI for their efforts. 

Pick any major brand and you’ll see their content strategy start to incorporate content focused around the holiday season by this time of the year. Positioning for this crucial time begins months before as many brands want people to look forward to the deals and offers that they introduce to increase sales. 

That’s not the only way that a brand can generate buzz and increase engagement for the holiday season, though. Contests are a great way to keep the audience engaged and hooked to the content. Everybody loves free stuff, after all, and what better time of the year to give free stuff away than the holiday season?

Why contests can help improve your overall social media presence

Contests are a great way to incentivize people to follow and interact with the brand. There's always the potential for them to win something and that's good enough to keep people interested in the brand. It's also a great way to build awareness since people are likely going to share the contests with their friends. This helps bring more people into the fold, thereby amplifying the brand's reach. 

The incentive that contests provide can also be leveraged to increase subscribers, whether for a social media account or a newsletter. That can be made one of the ways for people to enter the contest. It's a minor action on their part that results in a significant increase of followers for the brand.

Contests also see higher engagement compared to conventional social media posts. Higher engagement is a favorable signal for the algorithms that rank content on social media networks. Once it picks up that the brand is getting a lot of likes, retweets, pins, shares, comments, and more from its audience, it will boost the reach so that more people are attracted to that page.

Top social media contest ideas for this holiday season

Launch a multi-day giveaway contest

Since the idea here is to elevate the reach for as long as possible, a multi-day contest that promises a giveaway at the end is a great way to achieve that objective. It's also a great way to keep up the momentum and stand out from the competition.

Remember, most brands are performing similar activities this time of the year, so there needs to be some differentiation. A multi-day contest that promises giveaways is a good idea since it will entice the audience to keep checking back even if they don't win one. As long as they're returning to the brand's page, they’re continuing to interact with the content and that also increases the possibility of conversions. 

It’s important to strike the right balance. A multi-day giveaway contest shouldn’t be dragged out for too long that it ultimately ends up feeling like a neverending mess. Keep it limited to 3-4 days and better yet, launch multiple such contests throughout the month to sustain the elevated engagement levels. 

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