Weekly Campaign Idea: Voting Competition

Each week on Socially Stacked, we feature a social media marketing Campaign to inspire marketers and ShortStack users. If you're looking for a low maintenance, easy to use, high-quality and engaging promotion, a voting competition is what you want.

At ShortStack.com our voting elements are popular features that are included in campaigns. They're popular because people love expressing their opinions, even more when all it takes is one click of their mouse. Add a potential prize in the mix and you've got yourself the perfect formula for a successful campaign.A properly run voting competition can yield high engagement, high participation, and lots of leads! Three things that we know every marketer is looking for when they run a promotion. For the purpose of this article, we'll be talking about a voting competition where fans submit AND vote on entries. Another form of a voting competition is a vote-only promotion where the brand uploads the content that will be voted on.

Here are 6 Things to Remember When Building a Voting Competition

1. Monitor entries: When you run a voting competition, your campaign will have at least two stages; the entry stage and the voting stage. Ideally you will have a panel of judges that will intervene between the entry and voting stage to ween through the entries. We recommend pre-determining a select number of winners so your panel of judges knows exactly what they're looking for and know the number of finalists to choose. From there, you can upload the final entries, alert the finalists, and ask them to begin voting and encouraging their friends to vote.

‍2. Prevent voting fraud: This is huge! If you allow anyone to vote as many times as they want, you're sure to attract that one person who is going to sit at their computer or phone and vote over and over again. A better approach is to limit your voting in order to prevent this type of fraud. ShortStack.com provides a variety of options for reducing voting fraud. This includes setting up voting limits based on time or email address.

‍3. Include a share element on each entry: Make it easy for your entrants to share their entries with their friends by adding a "share" button to each entry. ShortStack.com's share button allows you to determine which social networks your fans can share to and provides the option for your fans to share manually. The buttons can be customized to fit your campaign.

‍4. Keep mobile in mind: 43% of the entries that businesses see on their ShortStack.com campaigns are from mobile users. This means you'll want to make it easy for your visitors to vote for their favorite entry no matter where they're coming from. Campaigns built with ShortStack.com are automatically mobile friendly. Tweet "43% of the entries that businesses see on their ShortStack.com campaigns are from mobile users."

‍5. Leverage your entrants' participation: Once your campaign hits the voting stage, it's up to you and your entrants to get people to vote. One way to attract votes is to encourage your entrants to get votes with an incentive. In the example below, Junk Kouture, asked every finalist to submit a blog post that showed them how they promoted their entry to get votes. They then selected a winning team and featured them and their story on their blog.

‍6. Talk about your competition on your blog and website: The more exposure to any campaign you can receive the better, but this is even more true when it comes to a voting campaign. The previous tip showed a way how you can create blog posts that support you campaign, but you can also consider embedding your campaign into your website or designing a separate website that provides in-depth details about your promotion.

Example of a Voting Competition

Junk Kouture is a national competition challenging teenagers to create high-end wearable fashion from every day junk. The first phase of the competition asks students from across Ireland and Scotland to enter photos of their best recycled wearable couture design. A panel of judges then narrowed the entries down to 80 per region - north, south, east and west. The final voting took place through an online campaign and the winners were determined by a panel of judges and votes received. The Junk Kouture campaign was built by Wurkhouse Creative Digital Agency. To see more details about the Junk Kouture campaign and see results, check out the following resources. Junk Kouture WebsiteComprehensive Report For more information on the Junk Kouture giveaway you can contact Paul Curran: paul@wurkhouse.com.