How do you leverage user-generated content and social proof from your contest or giveaway participants?

Understanding your end result is super crucial. You first need to understand exactly the point of why you want to run the giveaway. Some common measures can be: - Gain following - Gain brand exposure - Increase sales by bringing new people to the platform

When brainstorming a giveaway, we always start with our goal and how we aim to measure the success of that goal. Your goal will determine the channel that is best for that giveaway. Depending on your audience, social may not always be the right avenue. However, if your priority is to figure out where your audience is, giveaways can be an opportunity to gain these types of insights. In our organisation, we've found that giveaways are a great avenue to collect feedback from our community and help us foster engagement by opening up conversations about what they would like to see more (or less) of in our weekly content.

One important thing to remember is to match the ask/effort of the person with the prize you are offering to ensure maximum participation l. Too often you see UGC comps that with non attractive prizes for the ask.

Having a prize that fits your brand and following is so important. For example, if you have a cookbook and share some recipes on your platform, you would want to make the giveaway food-related by making the prize the cookbook and something related to food/cooking. Clearly your followers follow you for a reason and you wouldn't want your giveaway to deviate from that.

Here are some of my favorite ways to promote a giveaway: - If you have a newsletter, send out an email blast announcing that you have an exciting giveaway coming up and specify the date and where it will be posted. Then on the day that the giveaway goes live, send another email to announce that the giveaway is live. - Having other people share your giveaway, especially if they are in a similar niche is the best way to promote your giveaway effectively. This will get new eyeballs to your page and more opportunity for them to enter the giveaway. - Instagram story: Create excitement and tease the audience that you will be doing a giveaway and give them a date and time to check it out.

A brand that invests in UGC is a brand that speaks "with" its customers instead of speaking "to" them. User-generated content is the easiest way for a brand to engage with its customer base. When you give your customers a voice, they will give back to you.

Liking and commenting on each comment is a great way to boost engagement as well as connect with your follower. What I typically do is have people tag someone in the giveaway but make each tag a separate comment. This not only boosts engagement but also makes it easy to pick a winner.

UGC is such a great way to build trust with other followers. People buy from other people and trust their opinions. UGC is the social media version of word of mouth marketing.

User Generated Content (UGC) is the ultimate third-party endorsement, which is powerful PR. Don't forget that there is data to mine and analyze behind UGC as well. If you're collaborating with creators or if users are just creating content on their own, try reaching out to them for screenshots or exports of the insights from those posts so you can include them in your campaign reporting or use them to better understand what content pieces were successful and why.

User generated content is a goldmine for building trust in websites through real users. It's always good for transparency to call out when certain feedback has been captured through a contest, but it doesn't mean the feedback on the product / service itself is incorrect. Try using a/b testing to see how, and where, to promote this UGC across the site