A social media contest is a fast way to increase reach and the number of followers. It has two pitfalls, however. The first is audience quality: with a valuable universal prize, the contest attracts people who enter every contest and have no interest in the brand, so reach after it ends drops even lower than before it. A more suitable prize is the company's own product or service, which appeals only to relevant people. The second pitfall is the rules – the contest must have published terms including the method of drawing winners and deadlines, it must respect the platform's rules, which tend to prohibit making participation conditional on tagging other people, and prizes above a set value give rise to a tax liability, which the winner must be informed about.
See also: Consumer competitions, Organic reach, User-Generated Content.
