Sweepstakes and contests have become a widespread activity on social networks. Apparently, the main reason is due to the obsession of the managers of community (community manager) to get the largest number of followers and demonstrate that their work is efficient. But how can we determine whether this practice will benefit the long – term brand? 

The activities proposed to members of the community should have goals that contribute to achieving the objectives of the company and should not be worked in isolation. Then to determine whether a sweepstakes or contest will contribute to the profitability of the company, we must ask the following questions: 

In what sense will change the community after the sweepstakes or contest?

If the answer is just to have more followers and there is no other benefit, we are creating a community of no value to the company. It is that many think that having many followers already taken the first step and then we’ll see, but if we do this we would be doing a very similar job to the radio or the press. Issue information for many people hoping to find at that hearing people we care about. It is assumed that social networks allow further progress in efficiency and can interact only with those who we want to avoid being invasive. 

Does the sweepstakes or contest, motivate members to be more active?

Many managers community (community manager) think that the more followers you have your community, more interaction exist and all these people will recommend the brand or company. This is not entirely true, people join communities that find a common interest and if the interest of all those people was just the gift, if any interaction or feedback, would only be concerning gifts and during the time duration of the promotion. If we are looking for conversation and recommendations about our brand, under this scenario would not occur. 

What are the real objectives of this activity?

Sweepstakes and contests as any other activity performed on the community, you must have objectives that support the goals of profitability.These objectives include:

• Motivate participants and increase participation, in this case the awards should be related to enhance the prestige of the participants.
• Reactivate the participation of community members. Sometimes it happens that members are no longer active for periods.
• Generate discussion about new products or services, in this case the contest activities must be related to promote discussion on them.
• Getting the base email addresses. In this case we must refine activities for people to leave their profile data are as tight as to what we want.

The important thing is to be clear that we do these activities in our community. Because if our goal is to increase the participation of members even after the contest or sweepstakes, the interest that made the participant reaches the community, should not the prize. 

What is the purpose of your sweepstakes and contests?