How to Run Promotions on Social Media & with Creators- A Practical Guide
On paper, running a promotion through social media or creators sounds straightforward. You brief the people involved, get the content live and start driving participation.
For a straightforward piece of branded content, that may be enough. But add a prize, an entry mechanic or a winner at the end of it and you are dealing with something different. It is no longer just a social campaign. It is a promotion, with all the practical and promotional compliance questions that come with running one.
And those questions tend to appear quite quickly once real people start taking part.
Start by separating the content from the entry
One of the easiest approaches is to run the whole promotion within the social platform itself. Ask people to comment, like a post, share something or follow an account to enter.
There is an obvious appeal to this. There are fewer steps for the participant and everything happens in one place.
The problems often come later.
A private profile may make an entry impossible to verify. A comment might be deleted. Platform data may not give you everything you need to establish whether somebody entered correctly. And if winner selection relies entirely on social activity, creating a reliable record of the entries can become more complicated than expected.
We have seen this in practice. Our Auto Trader x Spud Bros Instagram prize draw case study involved a promotion where the entry mechanic sat on a third-party social platform, meaning validation and independent oversight had to be considered as part of the campaign rather than after it.
That does not mean social platforms should not be used. Quite the opposite. They are very good at generating attention and participation.
But there is a difference between where somebody discovers a promotion and where their entry is actually captured.
For many campaigns, a dedicated landing page or microsite provides a much clearer structure behind the social content. It can also give the brand greater control over entry validation, data collection and the overall user journey. Our digital promotion services are built around exactly this part of the campaign.
Make the route to entry obvious
Participants should not have to work out how the promotion operates from three Instagram captions, a creator video and a set of terms hidden somewhere else.
Before launch, there should be a simple answer to three questions: where does somebody enter, what do they need to do and how do you know that they have done it?
If those answers are vague internally, they are unlikely to become clearer once the campaign is live.
This is particularly important when several creators are involved. Each creator may tell the story differently, but the underlying entry mechanic cannot change from one account to another.
The creative can flex. The rules should not.
Clear promotion Terms & Conditions matter here too. They need to reflect the actual mechanic being communicated to participants, including eligibility, entry requirements, closing dates, prize details and how winners will be selected.
Give creators freedom without changing the promotion
The reason brands use creators is because their content should not look as though it has been written by a brand team and passed through six rounds of approval.
Creators bring their own audience, style and credibility. That is the point.
But there is still information they need to communicate accurately.
If the promotion requires somebody to visit a landing page, make a purchase, upload something or complete a particular action, the creator content has to lead people into that journey correctly.
Small differences in wording can otherwise create surprisingly large problems. One creator says that a comment counts as an entry. Another tells followers to click a link. A third misses an eligibility condition altogether.
Suddenly the brand has three slightly different versions of the same promotion in public.
Good briefing therefore is not about scripting every word. It is about being very clear about which parts creators can interpret and which parts they cannot.
That is also why the marketing communications surrounding a promotion should be considered alongside the terms themselves. Our legal and compliance team reviews promotional communications as well as the underlying rules to help make sure the two tell the same story.
Remember who is responsible
Using a creator does not transfer responsibility for the promotion to them.
The campaign may appear on their channel and be delivered in their voice, but the promoter still needs to understand what is being communicated, how people are entering, what happens to their data and how the eventual outcome will be delivered.
That distinction can become blurred because creator marketing deliberately feels less controlled than traditional advertising.
Creative control can be shared.
Accountability cannot.
Data also deserves particular attention here. If the campaign is collecting names, email addresses, dates of birth or other personal information, brands need to understand what is being collected, why it is needed and what happens to it afterwards. Our guide to GDPR marketing compliance for promotions covers the data side of promotional campaigns in more detail.
Think about validation before you need it
A promotion can generate plenty of engagement and still leave the promoter with a surprisingly difficult job when it comes to identifying a valid winner.
Imagine selecting somebody only to discover that their profile is private and the required action cannot be checked. Or finding that several apparent entries belong to the same person. Or having no reliable way to establish whether a participant completed the mechanic within the promotional period.
These are not particularly unusual situations.
The important question is whether the campaign has a process for dealing with them.
That means deciding in advance what constitutes a valid entry, what evidence will be available and what happens where an entry cannot be verified.
The same applies to duplicate entries, false claims, automated submissions and attempts to manipulate the mechanic. Social visibility can make campaigns particularly attractive to people looking for weaknesses in the system.
Our marketing fraud prevention work covers many of these issues, including manipulated social engagement, false entries and attempts to abuse promotional mechanics.
If there is an obvious way to game a promotion, somebody will normally find it.
Do not leave the winner journey until the end
A lot of energy goes into launching social campaigns. Comparatively little can go into thinking about what happens after somebody wins.
Yet this can be one of the more complicated parts of the promotion.
How will the winner be contacted? What happens if they do not respond? How will eligibility be checked? Is proof of age required? Does the prize involve travel? Are there restrictions on where it can be fulfilled?
For a simple product prize, these questions may be relatively easy to answer.
For international campaigns, travel prizes, experiences or high-value rewards, they can be considerably less so.
Independent winner selection can also be important, particularly where brands need a clear audit trail showing how a winner was chosen. PromoVeritas provides prize draw, winner management and prize fulfilment services covering the process from validation and winner selection through to notification and fulfilment.
Our recent O2 Blue Mondays prize draw case study is a good example. The promotion combined recurring participation with an independently managed prize draw and winner verification, so the process after entry was considered as carefully as the entry mechanic itself.
The winner journey is part of the promotion and should be planned at the same time as the entry journey, rather than being worked out after a name has been drawn.
Consider what happens if the campaign works very well
This is a nice problem to have, but it is still a problem if nobody planned for it.
A mechanic that is perfectly manageable with a few hundred entries may become painful with tens of thousands.
Social campaigns can move quickly, particularly where several large creators are involved. A post performs better than expected, gets shared beyond the original audience and suddenly the volume of participation looks very different from the forecast.
The entry process, validation method, data handling and winner selection process all need to be capable of dealing with that increase.
The question is not simply whether people can enter.
It is whether the promotion still works properly when a lot of them do.
Performance and control are not opposites
There is always some tension in creator campaigns.
Brands want the content to feel natural rather than heavily managed. At the same time, a promotion needs enough structure to make sure people understand what they are entering and that the eventual result can be administered properly.
Trying to control every word usually defeats the purpose of working with creators.
Giving away control of the underlying promotion creates a different set of problems.
The better approach is to separate the two.
Give creators room to create the content their audience expects, while keeping the mechanics, entry process, validation and fulfilment firmly structured behind it.
One final question before launch
Before a social or creator promotion goes live, it is easy to concentrate on how much engagement it might generate.
There is another question worth asking:
Will this still work once real people start interacting with it?
Because engagement only tells you that people are watching, clicking or taking part.
It does not tell you whether the promotion itself works.
And while brands can outsource much of the execution of a creator campaign, they cannot outsource responsibility for what happens next.
