How to Run a Viral Social Media Contest 2018

Perfect the Art of Viral Contest Funnels

A viral contest is an excellent tactic to generate quality leads. Through viral contests, you grow your email list of a specific consumer to follow up with a full-scale email marketing campaign. This method is very simple, but there are a few keys to execution that are imperative to success.

The prize

The biggest key to a successful viral contest is a well-chosen prize that only your prospects would want. Never give away an iPad, or something that is broadly appealing. By choosing something unique and valuable specifically to the audience you are targeting, you will generate lots of well-qualified leads that are high-value and ready to buy.

The opt-in page

Viral contest funnels are simple; they have only two components, maximizing engagement with viral sharing and generating the most leads possible. The first page is the opt-in page, it presents the prize and a call to action. While this page is simple, most of the work in setting up a viral contest is done before you get to this stage. You need to determine the prize, graphics, and the offer with careful consideration to target your specific audience. We recommend attentive market research and help from a copywriter.

Viral thank you page

Once they’ve given a name and email, the reader lands on the viral thank you page. They are presented a unique URL and prompted to share it on social media channels. This URL leads back to the funnel and records who posted it. The more the more people they invite to the contest, the higher the chance they’ll have to win. You can either randomize the choice of winner, or straight up award the prize to the person who invited the most people. The thank you page must include these instructions and terms, along with the contest rules and a reminder of how awesome the prize is so they share like crazy.

Tip: You may choose to incentivize people with benchmark awards. When they reach a certain number of shares, they receive a small prize (to do this, use the tool UpViral).

The tools

Our go-to software to build viral contests is UpViral. You can also use a simple landing page builder to set up a contest funnel, but it won’t have some of the specific tools that are helpful for viral contests like a unique share link to track referrals, benchmark awards and choosing a winner at random.

We have perfected the art of viral contest funnels, now you can too.