The Rise of the Social Media Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes have been a staple of consumer incentive programs for decades. But the growth of Facebook and other social media platforms is opening up new channels for brands looking to engage consumers and giving companies compelling new ways to incentivize their employees with merchandise, gift cards, and other rewards. 

One of the companies on the forefront of this move into social media is Parrut, which designs social sweepstakes programs for brands. Incentive spoke with one of the company’s co-founders, Tarek Pertew, to discuss where sweepstakes are heading.

Pertew: We build open scripts that help the company launch its own email or Facebook sweepstakes or referral contests, and put it together in a couple of minutes. They come to the site, drop in their creative, which is essentially the art you would need on your Facebook page to encourage people to Like and enter the sweepstakes. Once live, it’s up to you to push it via Facebook and through your newsletter.

With our email promotions, it’s essentially the same thing—you use scripts and create the page on your own site, so it looks like your site or we host it. Then you just run the sweepstakes with a banner message like, “Enter your email and share with friends for a chance to win.” Then we have an analytic dashboard that shows how many Likes or shares through Twitter and Facebook and how many new subscribers you have—or click-throughs. 

Our original goal was to just build the technology to run promotions and sweepstakes through email and Facebook. But through having to answer a lot of questions and do our own research to provide the best results to the client, we learned a lot about promotions and the space in general.

Pertew: We’ve made great relationships with the Pilot Group, which has a series of publications that use our product, like MLB Insiders Club Magazine and HGTV Magazine. These were our early clients, so we’ve done most of our early development working with digital publishers. 

Now that we’ve positioned ourselves with that, we have added a range of other brands. We are at a point today where almost every single brand is trying to increase their digital audience acquisition and engagement. 

Pertew: Really understanding your audience is what’s going to help you pick the right product or service to use as the incentive for the sweepstakes. We provide the tools, but it could be a cold start if you have an awful incentive. 

For example, when HGTV launched their sweepstakes, they gave away a high-end Toro snowblower. Their audience loved that, and they had a lot of engagement on their Facebook page when they asked, “Who wants a snowblower?” That product resonated very much with the audience. 

Then you have EBoost, an energy drink company that gave away a year’s supply of their energy drink packets. You already have, say, 25,000 fans who have tried your product and like it, so in that case why not give them more for free? 

Pertew: Perception of the ability to win is super important. When you give away one thing, the belief that you can win is relatively small—it’s like the lottery. But when you increase the number of products that somebody can win, that makes a drastic change in engagement. 

For instance, if you say, “Enter our sweepstakes for a chance to win one Kindle Fire,” you’ll get some entries and engagement will be okay, depending on the brand. But if you say, “We’re giving away 10 Kindle Fires,” the engagement is going to go through the roof, because the perception that you can win increases exponentially. 

Pertew: Most brands right now are really trying to step up users' ability to learn about a product through their friends. You can do that very easily through sweepstakes. You enter your name and email, just like earlier traditional forms where you enter your information on a card. 

But now with social, it’s your name and email address, and, by the way, if you share on Facebook or Twitter, you’ll get additional entries and increase your chances of winning. Your friends are getting validation through you about this brand and this giveaway, so that increases trust, which is key for sweepstakes. Like when LivingSocial offered a Whole Foods deal and suddenly everyone’s Facebook Walls were riddled with it from all of their friends. Everyone else bought it, and they set a record with that.

Pertew: The number-one metric that’s gaining a lot more focus is the level of engagement, or people that have been active on your page within the last seven days. If you have a million fans, and there are 24 people talking about this, then you have nearly a million fans not engaging with your brand. The main focus is on getting that engagement metric up. 

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