Lead generation. Lead nurturing. Engagement. Traffic. Increased reach. Social media contests can help you achieve all of this and more – they’re the perfect way of both promoting your business online and reaching a larger audience, but also a great way to generate leads for your business and to nurture relationships with existing fans.

According to Igor Kholkin, founder of digital marketing agency Avidon Marketing Group, “Social media contests deliver the most aggressive user growth for every marketing dollar invested in them. In this blog post, I’m going to share the 10 best tools to help you create social media contests (in no particular order):

1. SweepWidget
2. Vyper
3. Woobox
4. Wishpond
5. Shortstack
6. Heyo
7. Rafflecopter
8. Votigo
9. Pagemodo
10. SnapApp
11. Tabsite
12. Gleam

10 best tools to create social media contests

1. SweepWidget

SweepWidget is the perfect tool to run highly engaging contests, viral giveaways, and sweepstakes. It’s excellent for increasing your social media followers, leads, email lists, website traffic, and brand awareness.

Some of the best features of SweepWidget:

• Integrates with 30+ social media platforms
• Collect unlimited followers, likes, shares, comments, and more
• Has 90+ different entry methods

• Powerful viral sharing referral system
• Create totally custom forms
• 20+ email integrations
• Instant rewards, instant coupons, and tiered prizes
• Leaderboards & much more

SweepWidget is an excellent all-around tool for running social media contests. It makes it easy to massively grow your social engagement in a short period of time. Also, it’s an extremely affordable option compared to their competitors. You’ll get all the features you’ll ever need (and more) without breaking the bank!

2. Vyper

VYPER is a great tool for running contests, giveaways, sweepstakes and referral programs. It is packed full of features to help you grow your email list, revenue, social following and engagement.

  This contest tool uses a points system which is interesting. So people sign up, then get rewarded for referring others and completing bonus actions. As they collect points they unlock prizes. There are multiple prize types, a few of them are random winners, placements, milestones, redemptions etc.   Not only can you collect new email leads and customers from referrals but you can also use the bonus actions to;

• Grow your social following
• Get people to tag friends in social posts
• Get people to share your blog posts and content
• Get people to complete quizzes or answer questions
• Get people to upload images to Instagram and stories
• Get people to share your Facebook posts

There are pre-set bonus actions or you can make your own. It’s very flexible.   We also like that it has a bunch of different display options. You can use their landing page builder, the website widget or the embed option. The live builder makes it really easy to design and implement your campaign quickly.

  You can add countdown timers, videos, images, gamification, leaderboards, multiple prizes and it’s fully customizable to fit your brands look and feel.   Take a look at some of the VYPER examples and features here. They also have a lot of training and guides on running contests on their blog which is worth checking out.

3.    Woobox

Woobox is a tool for creating marketing campaigns of all kinds – not just social media contests, but also polls and interactive games, landing pages and lead generation forms.

There are all kinds of different contests you can create with Woobox, for Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, YouTube and Tumblr, such as:

• Giveaways: provide a great incentive, create an entry form (which is fully customizable) to collect the entrants’ data, offer bonuses to those who get others to enter the giveaway and let the tool decide the winner. There are different types of giveaways that you can create, such as sweepstakes and instant wins.
• Photo, video and hashtag contests: create a contest that features user generated content to get your audience more involved in the process; plus, you can also enable voting, to make it even more engaging

Marketing campaigns created with Woobox can then be shared/published on all kinds of platforms apart from social media, including on a blog or website, on mobile, in pop-ups or on landing pages.

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @woobox via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @woobox via @lilachbullock”]

4.    Wishpond

Wishpond offer a selection of different marketing tools, similar to Woobox: landing pages, pop-ups and forms, marketing automation features, as well as, of course, contests and promos for engaging your fans.

Most of the contest tools from Wishpond are for Facebook, but you can also use it to create Instagram hashtag contests, as well as Pinterest contests.

On Facebook, you can create:

• Sweepstakes
• Photo and video contests
• Essay contests
• Coupons
• Vote contests
• Photo caption contests and
• Referral promotions

You can then customise your contest forms, add voting buttons to collect emails from participants, referral rewards and even a Facebook Like button pop-up or a Twitter follow-gate, to gain more fans and followers.

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @wishpond via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @wishpond via @lilachbullock”]

5.    Shortstack

Shortstack is another marketing tool for creating social contests, landing pages and forms. You can integrate Shortstack with Twitter, Instagram and Facebook to create all kinds of different contests:

• Twitter: hashtag or form submissions and link sharing to get people to your contest landing page
• Instagram: create user generated contests and allow submissions either by form or hashtag
• Facebook: publish your contest directly on your Facebook Page and add social sharing buttons to your contests

All contests created on Shortstack can also be published as landing pages, or they can be embedded on your website or blog.

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @shortstacklab via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @shortstacklab via @lilachbullock”]

6.    Heyo

Heyo is a tool for creating contests to be published anywhere on the web: on your website/blog, on mobile, or on different social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook or Instagram. Use their templates to easily create contests optimised for any device and add social sharing buttons to boost shares.

You can use Heyo to create all kinds of different contests, such as:

• Photo and video contests: get users to submit their own videos and photos
• Essay contests: if your audience really wants to get to work, have them submit their essays for a chance to win
• Sweepstakes: publish your sweepstakes contest on different platform and start collecting leads; you can draw the winner at a random, have participants refer their friends, set up instant win contests, or set Twitter or photo sweepstakes

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @heyo via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @heyo via @lilachbullock”]

7.    Rafflecopter

Rafflecopter has one main focus: to help you create the best, most engaging giveaway possible. It’s super easy to use (it takes minutes to create a campaign) and basically all you need to do is decide on what the prize will be, choose the entry methods for the giveaway so as to get as many quality leads as possible out of it and then just sit back and start collecting entries – or instead of sitting back, promote your giveaway to get as many participants as possible!

Rafflecopter can also be integrated with other social networks (Pinterest, Twitter) so that you easily promote your giveaway across social media, as well as with all major email marketing/marketing automation tools, to help you generate more leads for your email list.

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @rafflecopter via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @rafflecopter via @lilachbullock”]

8.    Votigo

Votigo allows you to create beautiful interactive marketing campaigns, including giveaways, quizzes, polls, sweepstakes and contests.

In terms of contests, you can create:

• Photo and video contests with user generated content
• Hashtag campaigns
• Instagram contests
• Essay contests
• Sweepstakes for Facebook and Twitter, as well as photo sweepstakes
• Instant win contests

All of their contests can be run on social media, on mobile and on websites or blogs.

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @votigo via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @votigo via @lilachbullock”]

9.    Pagemodo

Pagemodo is a tool for those who want to take their Facebook Pages to the next level: they offer custom tabs for Pages, social contests and you can use it to schedule and plan your Facebook content.

Contests are very easy to set up with Pagemodo and you can create all kinds of different contests – basically, all of the usual suspects:

• Photo and video contests
• Essay contests
• Trivia games
• Sweepstakes and Giveaways with random winners or manual selection
• Coupon campaigns

Your contest will look beautifully both on desktops and on mobile devices and you can rest assured that all of the Facebook rules and regulations are respected.

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @pagemodo via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @pagemodo via @lilachbullock”]

10. SnapApp

Interactive content can generate a lot of engagement and attention to your website and your social profiles; SnapApp aim to help you create this type of content, easily, such as calculators, assessments and personality tests, interactive videos and knowledge tests and quizzes, among others. Apart from all the cool interactive content you can create with this tool, you can also set up contests and sweepstakes for your website or for your social media:

• Photo and video contests with user generated content
• Sweepstakes
• Caption and text contests with user generated content

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @snap_app via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @snap_app via @lilachbullock

11. Gleam

Gleam is much more than just a giveaway app; it is a comprehensive business growth platform that offers four distinct growth apps: Competitions, Rewards, Gallery, and Capture.

The Competitions app is the flagship offering of Gleam and enables you to launch giveaways, sweepstakes, and contests on social media and beyond. One of the standout features of Gleam is its verified entry to social media platforms, which simplifies the contest entry process for social media users. The platform also has built-in viral sharing options and one-click entry methods for an effortless experience.

Creating a contest with Gleam is incredibly easy thanks to the intuitive drag-and-drop tool, which enables you to customize your contest type, entry methods, and more. You can even embed YouTube videos into your contests to make them more engaging and shareable.

Gleam also offers a dedicated WordPress plugin if you prefer to host your contests on your own website. In addition to Competitions, you can leverage the Rewards app to provide instant rewards such as coupons and voucher codes for completing specific actions to incentivize your followers.”

Bonus tool:  Tabsite

Tabsite offers several apps for creating promotions on web, mobile and Facebook (along with some other apps, in fact!)

You can use it to create several kinds of contests:

• Photo and video contests
• Sweepstakes
• Essay contests
• And timeline contests

[clickToTweet tweet=”10 best tools to create social media contests @tabsite via @lilachbullock” quote=”10 best tools to create social media contests @tabsite via @lilachbullock”]

Conclusion

With so many tools available to choose from, creating a social media contest is easy as pie – in most cases, it takes minutes to set up a contest and get it running. And while you might be the one giving away the prize, you’ll actually get so much more in return: new quality leads (especially if your prize is your own product/service), increased engagement and reach on social media and your blog/website, new fans for your social profiles and much more.

Have you created any contests on social media yet? What are your favourite types of social contests? Let me know in your comments and please share:)