5 Things To Remember When Setting Up A Video Contest

In my recent blog post How To Set Up A Video Contest I spoke about the back-office and set up of a video contest. Today I wanna give you some great advise for how to execute the contest. What to keep in mind and what I personally learned from own experience.

1. The Goal. Like with all social media campaigns you should first determine why you want to set up this contest.
   Is it to get more subscribers on YouTube?
   Is it to increase the channel views on your channel?
   Is it to provide something great and fun for your audience?
   Is it to impress share holders of the company?
   Is it to make money?
   Drive traffic to your website?
   Whatever it is, write it down, speak openly about it and take notice on the status of the different channels BEFORE you launch the contest to be able to compare the results. How many fans do you have on Facebook, how many visitors to the blog and how many channel views and comments on Youtube for example.
   
   
2. Clear Instructions. Video may seem simple to you and me, but we are definitely not the average internet surfer. Provide clear instructions on HOW to participate. I'm not kidding you here. The last contest we set up we wrote down what formats we accepted and still the majority of the files uploaded were jpegs, docs, excels and power-points. Show HOW to participate with pictures. Make a dummy-guide.
   
   
   People will likely imitate exactly what you have told them, so be creative in your examples and if you can - provide more than one example. Another point here ts to make it EASY for people to participate by not requiring any specific great quality. Let people film with their cell phones and you will make their life's much easier and you'll receive many more videos!
   
   
3. The Prize.Make it something good. If you can't afford it, then you're better of not launching a video contest. It will be more work than benefits because not a lot of people will enter the contest. An iPad, a laptop, a trip, a great gift-card for something online are some attractive prizes. If you can also provide something small for the first 100 participants that's a big plus. In our case we gave away 5eur gift-cards on Amazon to the first 100 people.
   
   
4. The Promotion.Make sure the whole company knows about the contest. Everyone should help promoting it, in their email signatures, to their friends, through their Twitter accounts. Post the contest on your Facebook page, your blog, website, Twitter account and keep posting somewhere on a daily basis.
   
   
5. The Legal Stuff.Make sure the company's lawyer takes a look at the legal notes and make sure you are covered for all types of incidents. Even if putting in there that you have the right to change the rules may sound ridiculous it can be helpful when you bump into something completely unexpected. However, this situation should be avoided and could obviously create a bunch of bad noise and upset people so it's just an emergency case option. Count on people getting upset about their video not having the same success as other participants videos. Make sure you are very clear that you won't accept any double voting, friend campaign-commenting to win and that you have the right to disqualify anyone breaking the rules.

Like a last point I would say, LEARN. Your first contest won't be perfect but take note about what you could have done better and keep it for the next time.

Have fun and Good Luck!

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