The OpenWater Blog

9 Tips to Improve Your Awards Program’s Social Media Strategy

Social media isn’t just for posting what you ate for lunch or the latest family vacation photos. In fact, nowadays you’re as likely to see a post of where your coworker went on vacation, as you are to see an update about an organization you’re following.

Awards programs use social media for many reasons, ranging from raising awareness, to generating submissions. Unfortunately, as many programs have realized, breaking through the noise on social media is hard.

Often awards programs get discouraged because their efforts don’t yield the desired results. And as such, this part of their awards marketing strategy grows stagnant or gets abandoned altogether.

But we’re here to tell you not to give up! While breaking into the fast-paced world of social media is difficult, it provides an ideal space to connect with your target audience.

Below we’ll detail 9 different tactics to employ when building your presence on social media. Along with some time and patience, they will help you increase engagement and submissions.

1. Take a Public Vote

Getting your audience to engage and interact with you is key in social media. And what better way to do so than with a public vote? Allowing your followers (and those of your entrants) to have a hand in the selection of your finalists has several benefits. You’re raising program awareness, encouraging entrants to stay active, and increasing general engagement.

2. Promote Social Sharing

If you could get more exposure for your program with no extra effort or cost would you do it? Of course! Social sharing allows entrants to share their application with others in their network, providing your program with something very valuable: social proof.

3. Enable Social Login

Quick and simple are key buzzwords you can’t forget, even when it comes to awards program registration. With social login, entrants can log in with their social credentials. This reduces the barrier to entry and helps streamline the application process.

4. Create Advertisements

When planning your awards marketing on social media, you must consider your audience, their interests, and the factors that will motivate them to apply. By doing so, you can create targeted ads that will actually matter to prospective entrants. And if they find value in your ad, they’ll look for more information and move from prospective entrant to actual entrant.

5. Use Images

Social media has become extremely focused on images and visual media in general. They’re a great way for your audience to get to know your program. You can engage entrants with photos of your last awards gala or even showcase previous winners. This adds more depth to your program and will generate positive attention your organization needs.

6. Stay Consistent

If you post once and don’t do so again for weeks, it’s unlikely that users will remain engaged. As quickly as information passes through different social networks, staying active is crucial. To maintain interest you should post a variety of content, information, photos, and videos regularly. Then when you appear in their newsfeeds, they’ll pay attention, rather than wonder who you are (and why they should care).

7. Optimize Your Page

It’s great to create a unique page for your awards program. What’s not great is when you don’t do anything with it. Proper optimization means showcasing your program’s personality and all you have to offer. You have to work to get your audience’s attention and your page is the first step.

8. Interact With Your Audience

Social media is all about conversations. As such, you must reach out to audience members, offer useful content, and create value. This will show that you care about audience members as individuals and not just as extra entries for your program.

9. Ask for Help

When you want to spread awareness and widen your target audience, it can be difficult to do so on your own. But, when you’ve put in the effort to build relationships, you can ask for shares and retweets from your audience. This broadens your reach and builds social proof, offering dual benefits for your program.

Social media is a noisy environment where brands battle for attention from their audiences. By implementing the 9 tips above, your organization can come out on top of this battle and use social media to your advantage.

Want further guidance about how to implement the 9 tips described above? Download our whitepaper for actionable ideas and strategies you can put to use right now.

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Miriam Hancock

Miriam Hancock
Miriam is the Marketing Coordinator for OpenWater. When she isn't writing and designing content she paints and cooks for her own personal blog.

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