Part of what we do at Brando Social, as part of larger campaigns, are online competitions. We like to give people the sort of competition that they can get involved in rather than just fill in an entry form and forget about it. We don’t do ‘Luck of the Draw’, we give you stuff to share with your friends to promote both our competition and you at the same time. Here are our top tips to increase your chances of winning, some of the tools you can use to find people online that may help you and some words of advice from past winners.

Tips

Start using as many social media platforms as possible now.
The more involved in social media you are the more it can help you. The bigger your network the bigger your friends list. There’s more to social media than just Myspace and Facebook.
- Get a Twitter www.twitter.com
- Get a blog (and start commenting on other people’s blogs).
- Try some of these http://socialmediaanswers.com/niche-social-networking-sites/

Even if a competition is based on one social media platform, Myspace for example, that doesn’t mean you can’t promote yourself on others.
You’ll have different friends on different platforms so use each of your profiles to reach as many people as possible.
- Write Status updates with links to the competition page or your entry.
- Send out Myspace bulletins with competition or entry info. These stay up for 10 days and can be posted as many times as you like.
- Write a Myspace blog and/or personal blog with links or entry info. These are more permanent options that you can link back to.
- Private message your closest friends (over email or in Myspace, Facebook, Bebo etc.) asking for their help.
- Use Twitter to let people know about the competition.
- Post links on your Facebook page, these will show up on your friends news feeds.
- Start a Facebook group to promote yourself.
- Most forums have an ‘Off Topic’ section. Start a new thread in any forums you’re a member of asking people to support you (this often gives you access to thousands of people).

Send a personalised email to 5-10 friends who you know have different friend groups from each other. Ask each pass this on to their friends and so on.
One of our previous competition winners did this making a custom html email to gain support. See the video below to see exactly what he did.

If you can offer something in return for a vote/click/interaction then do.
Obviously only offer something you can deliver. If you’re a photographer send out a free image you’ve taken that your community might like, if you’re a musician maybe offer a free download. Again, see the video below to see what a past competition winner did.

Contact people at different times of the day.
Some of your friends who would be more than willing to help you may be overseas and due to the time difference they’ll miss your bulletins or Tweets. Spread out your updates so that you reach as many people as possible, all over the world.

Competitions pick up pace in the last few days, use this time wisely.
People either panic or start to feel safe in the last few days of the competition. Don’t do either, just keep working on getting votes.
- If you look like you’re winning don’t give up. We’ve seen people gain over a thousand votes in a single night and go from second to first place. Keep asking people for their help right up until voting ends, you may regret it if you don’t.
- Don’t panic and start to ask random people on random groups for votes, if it’s not your community they’ll think your spamming and then you’re just wasting your time. Only contact people you know will want to help you and urge them to keep contacting their communities.

Search Tools

To find out who else is talking about stuff you’re interested in, and are therefore good people to add as friends and start engaging with, take a look at these…..
- http://search.twitter.com/
- http://blogsearch.google.com/
- http://www.blinkx.com/

Case-Study

Brando Social ran a competition on behalf of Sony Ericsson to promote their C905 camera phone. The full campaign report can be found here http://www.brandosocial.com/work/sony-ericsson-c905 but here’s an interview with our winner, Ben Roberts, telling us how he won.

Donna Mills was the the runner up in the competition. Here she speaks about how she used her social networks to gain votes, the importance of these networks and also the handset itself.

Here are the answers given by two winners (there were four in total) from another competition we ran when we asked them ‘How did you promote yourself to get people to engage with your content?’

“I used Myspace bulletins, status updates, and also created a group on Facebook and invited all my friends to it, this group contained information about the competition and also links to my Myspace, so that people could vote.”
This 17 year old has 362 Myspace friends and 415 Facebook friends and came second with 432 interactions.

“I told a few friends about the competition, and they were happy to go on and help me get ‘clicks’. I posted numerous bulletins asking people to check out the badges on my profile, also there was a thread on the One Night Only Forum, which helped spread the word. I also put a link on my Bebo page.”
This 17 year old has 108 Myspace friends, 234 Bebo friends and access to 998 forum members and came 4th with 332 interactions.

Add all of the Brando Social team on Twitter and we’ll keep you up to date on any new competitions we’re running.