There is no doubt that online contests are an effective way to increase our online audience and capture new clients. There are many different applications (apps) and platforms to help us to organize our contest. http://www.hisocial.com/blog/en/16-key-points-to-choose-an-application-for-creating-contests-in-social-media/ If you want to see more related items visit http://www.hisocial.com/blog

1. 16 key points to choose an application for creating contests in
social media
There is no doubt that online contests are an effective way to increase our online
audience and capture new clients. There are many different applications (apps) and
platforms to help us to organize our contest. In this post we will see the characteristics
and features we should look for in order to take the right decision, and ensure our
contest is a successful one.
- Multiplatafom. There is no reason to limit a contest to just one of the social networks.
The app should allow us to present our contest, not just on one platform, e.g. Facebook,
but on a range of platforms such as Twitter, Linkedin, Google+ etc. To concentrate on
just one social network carries with it a high risk, in that you are soley dependent on the
behavior a single platform.
- Don’t forget your website. Social networks are important, but your site is equally as
important, if not more so! We should make sure that our contest is visible and
accessible directly from your page. It’s very risky to concentrate all our efforts on a
third party website – even if it is called Facebook. An effective platform will allow us,
if required, to diversify and distribute our promotional efforts properly.
- Virality. One of the key elements in determining the success of a contest are its viral
properties. The application should allow the participants to share the contest over all the
social networks, and thereby encourage more users to follow us. To do so, the
participants in our contests should be encouraged, in a proper way, to carry out these
viral actions.
- Legal compliance and the various rules that regulate the social networks. Obviously,
the chosen app should allow us to comply fully with everything set out in current
legislation. (for example, specifying our privacy policy, contest rules etc.).
Furthermore, it should adhere to all the legislation covering this type of promotional
activity on the networks in which we will be running our contest.
- Different types of contest. We should not limit ourselves to running just one type of
contest, and as such, the chosen platform should, as a bare minimum, allow us to run
contests with photos, videos and texts. While these are the most common formats, in
other more specific cases, it may be interesting to have access to less common contest
formats (e.g. songs or other types of music)
- Ease of Use. The process to launch our contest should be quick and easy. The creation
phase of the contest should not last more than ten minutes, and should be suitable for
everyone, without the need of any prior programming skills.
- Accessibility via mobile platforms. Access to the Internet through this type of device
is growing ever more common by the day, so it is advisable that the application will
modify any content to be viewed on them correctly.

2. - Multiplicity of Contest and distribution methods. There are applications that will
charge for each contest, or other promotion, undertaken and often limit their display to
just one Facebook page. This system is very inflexible and could considerably affect the
final cost. A system that allows multiple promotions and distribution methods for the
same price is undoubtedly a favorable and more economical option.
- Choice of Language. If our publicity objective speaks of a greater range of languages,
this characteristic is essential. If not, we automatically reduce its chances of greater
diffusion and virality.
- Defining the target market. It is often in our interest to limit participation in a contest
to a predetermined country or age group (inclusive of any legal constraints that may
apply) The chosen application should allow us to do this.
- Anti-fraud measures. The contests will undoubtedly attract a rouge element with
fraudulent intentions, who want to manipulate the results and capture the prizes; this is
especially true when the winner is chosen by a voting system. For this reason, the
application should offer mechanisms to avoid any such problems, for example, limiting
the number of entries for each participant, requiring some form of registration or control
in order to vote, limiting the number of votes that any one person may cast, etc.
- Completeness of any information offered. The ideal contest should provide
structured, graphical and comprehensive details of the contest, including: a description
of the contest, full details of our company, a list of participants etc. This will increase
the transparency of our contest, and as a result increase participation. The application
we choose should allow us to present this information in a clear and straight forward
manner.
- Personalization. We should be able to adapt the look and feel of our contest to be
consistent with our brand identity. An application that claims to do this should allow
full access to the css file that controls all graphical and visual aspects of the contest.
- Exclusive ownership of all personal data obtained during the contest. We should
ensure that we retain exclusive ownership over all data collected during our contest, to
do so we should always consult any legal disclaimer offered by the owner. It is also
important that we have easy access to the data, for example, being able to download it in
an xml file or similar.
- Statistics. We should have full access to all the data relevant to our contest: number of
visits, number of and geographical location of the participants, impact on social
networks etc. It’s best if the application gets this data from a third party specializing in
this area (e.g. Google Analytics). This will allow for greater completeness, and of
course reliability, of any data collected.
- Preview. When we are configuring the contest it is important that the application
allows us to see how it will look before publication. This will allow us to correct any
mistakes and carry out any testing in order to be sure that the contest offered to the
public will look exactly how we want.

3. In a later post we will explain in more detail how HiSocial is designed to meet each of
these requirements, and allow you to run truly successful contests. For now, we invite
you to try it for yourself free of charge by following the link below:
¡Sign up for free and create your contest with HiSocial!
http://www.hisocial.com/blog/en/16-key-points-to-choose-an-application-for-creating-
contests-in-social-media/
If you want to see more related items visit http://www.hisocial.com/blog