Social media challenges are tremendously helping entrepreneurs grow their businesses and increase their brand awareness. People love challenges on social media because it challenges them to become a better version of themselves. Challenges are an easy way to increase engagement and genuinely build your community. In this blog, our Social Advantage Team has outlined what exactly social media challenges are and five ways they can help your business flourish.
What are Social Media Challenges?
A social media challenge is when you create a focused prompt for each day over the span of the challenge and encourage others on social media to join you. These challenges have the opportunity of going viral because anyone can join in. Every social media challenge has goals for your audience to accomplish, from beginning to end. The challenge needs to have a clear mission so participants can understand what they are supposed to do, when to do it, and for how long. Starting a social media challenge, where your audience is, gives people the chance to interact with your brand and create a great community.
Increase Brand Awareness
When you design a successful challenge, people will associate it with your business. One of the best things about running social media challenges is that you and your audience get to win every single day of the challenge. You get to teach people throughout your social media challenge something that will help them with their future ideas and goals. No matter if you are using word-of-mouth or putting out great content yourself, social media is critical to increasing brand awareness and gives people the opportunity to find you. Anyone can participate in social media challenges, so even if the challenge was put on by someone else if your brand participates in viral challenges you can get more recognition.
Creates Beneficial User-Generated Content
Social media challenges often require the participants to take action every day. Don’t overwhelm your audience by giving them too much to do because they may give up. Give them just enough to keep them excited and engaged. Once people start your social media challenge, they will tag you and mention you in their posts. That is considered user-generated content, which is content created by people and not brands. Social media campaigns that utilize user-generated content see a 50% increase in engagement. This will help increase your followers which are more likely to become more dedicated to your brand.
Humanizes The Brand
People will be more likely to trust you and your brand after having a positive experience together throughout your social media challenge. Working with your audience, to help them better themselves, is a great way to differentiate your brand from others. Seeing everyone’s posts throughout the challenge can give you a different perspective of your audience, which can help build more genuine connections. Interacting with the participants will make them feel more connected to your brand, so as the challenge’s host you must take some time to respond to people.
The Potential To Go Viral
If you have a small following currently, social media challenges are a great way to help you build your audience. People can share and invite their friends to join in on these challenges because most people don’t want to try new things alone. With social media challenges, it’s only a matter of time before they go viral, then you’ll see many people participating. Remember, people want to interact with you and learn from you, but you have to push them to take action through social media challenges. If you can, add rewards to your challenges - everyone loves incentives!
Cost-Efficient
Staying within your marketing budget can be intimidating, especially whenever you are first starting. Luckily, social media has a massive reach and is a great way to get the most out of your budget. The internet has made sharing information so much easier and social media is no different. Many companies, big or small, have decided to invest a lot more time into their social media and can be an effective way to promote your business without all the extra expense that can come with in-person events. User-generated content, which we talked about above, is another way social media challenges are cost-efficient because regular people are promoting your brand, for free, which you can share and repost on your account.
Social media challenges help entrepreneurs to increase their brand awareness, humanize their brand, and are more cost-efficient for their digital marketing efforts. These challenges have the opportunity to go viral and create a bunch of user-generated content for the brand to repurpose and get its name out there. If you aren’t incorporating social media into your digital marketing, you are missing out on a huge audience. Need more help on your digital marketing strategy? Check out our blog on applications that can help you optimize your efforts!
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