Today, many businesses are involved in social media contests and, thus, it is imperative to define what “success” looks like?

So, measuring social media contest success is important and the first step should always be asking “what are we trying to accomplish?”  The goals most often associated with social media activities are branding-related, not strictly financial. And it’s a bit more difficult to

Measuring social media contest success

Measuring social media contest success

measure the return on investment achieved through brand building. The following should be treated as generalized ways to measure your social media success

Financial Returns

Against each of your commercial activities, there has to be some financial return. For example, you ran a Facebook contest that enters buyers of a certain product into a contest for a getaway. You could immediately measure the number of extra units sold during the month of your contest and weigh that against the cost of the app that ran your promotion and your own cost of the grand prize. So, if your social media contest goal was to increase revenue, the increase in revenue during that specific time period is a good indication of your success.

Traffic increase and visibility

Social media contests increase traffic and these contests are becoming popular every day. Because the more quality content that exists on the Internet and links back to your website, Facebook page, etc., the more search engines, like Google, perceive your business as worthy of a good search ranking. When people share your content with their own networks, it tells search engines that the content you produce is valuable. And the higher you rank on search engines, the more potential customers will find you and bring traffic to your site.

Before, starting a contest, you should try a Google search for your business and see where your various web pages and profiles fall and if these have increased after running the contest then this is a success for you.