Here’s a great article on http://www.eventmanagerblog.com by author KiKi L’Italien, that shows how you can create fun and engaging social media contests that will help energize your brand’s marketing effort.

Social Media contests seem like a surefire success engine for greater engagement and sharing. The truth is, like most things, it’s more complicated than that.

Running social media contests will not automatically create better engagement or guarantee your message will go viral. Excellent social media contests require substantial planning and nimble execution. They have many moving parts and potential points of failure.

What’s The Simplest, Most Organic Way For Your Audience to Play?

Consider the human behaviors involving technology that you’ve observed and think about the ways you can use those behaviors to your benefit. For example, for better or for worse, it is likely that your audience is familiar with the popularity of the “selfie” as a human-meets-tech behavior.

How can you apply this? Turn this natural selfie behavior into a social media contest by using several selfie “hot spots” throughout specific venues or highly visible locations for your intended audience, challenging spectators to engage by taking selfies and posting to social platforms using the contest hashtag for a chance to win.

A real-life example of applying human-tech behavior to social media marketing happened recently in France for the television show House of Cards. Large posters were displayed featuring Frank Underwood, a primary character played by actor Kevin Spacey, with an open area next to it with markings indicating where a person’s head should be in order to “face-swap” Snapchat-style. It isn’t hard to see how this might be adapted to fuel a social media contest.

The above is an excerpt from an article by KiKi L’Italien on http://www.eventmanagerblog.com. I encourage you to read her article: The Definitive Guide to Creating Social Media Contests where you can find a detailed checklist on running a successful social media contest.