How To Promote Online Voting Contests Without Annoying Your Fans

Hello and welcome to the final regular content day of the work week. We received such an overwhelmingly positive response from last week’s guest posts that we decided to welcome our friend from Checkered Owl back once more to share a recent piece of content he created.

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Over the past month I have been watching Lauren Mann & The Fairly Odd Folk take part in the CBC Searchlight contest, it has had several rounds of online voting which they have cleared through and are now in the final 4! They have done an incredible job of engaging their fan base to get this far and I thought getting a few insights from them could be a great lesson for all of us!

1. Can you briefly describe the contest you are currently in?

We are in the CBC Searchlight contest, which is trying to find the best new emerging artist in Canada through public voting and a panel of celebrity judges.

2. I think you guys have done an AMAZING job promoting frequently without getting annoying. What do you think made the difference?

That’s good that we haven’t been annoying! I guess the main thing is trying to keep all our posts about the contest different and interesting, so that they grab people’s attention. We’ve posted lots of photos, and some videos relating to the contest as well as live videos of I Lost Myself (the specific song entered in the Searchlight contest) and a new song, and all of that has helped to keep things interesting.

3. I’ve noticed you have done lots of custom graphics, do you think that helped?

I think people like having a visual. Not only are they eye-catching, but they’re also something that fans can share and re-tweet to get the word out. Text is good, but I think a lot of people these days have short attention spans, especially on social media, so having an image is a good way to grab their attention.

4. I know personally between a personal connection, liking your band page and the FB event, you have been in my feed constantly is there a specific strategy or schedule to achieve that?

Like I mentioned earlier, you really just have to cover all your bases, and that’s what we’ve tried to do with different forms of media and also being in many places at once. We’ve been promoting on our band page, but we also made an event and a group for the voting, so we could specifically connect with people and remind them to vote. We also make sure we’re promoting on twitter, instagram, making blog posts, and promoting on our personal pages to try and reach as many people as possible.

5. Lastly, what have you found has worked best to generate “shares”?

We started a contest of our own to encourage people to tweet and post about the contest, and at the end of each round one person won a prize pack containing tickets to a show, exclusive merch, music, and other random things. The first round we had about 60 shares, the next round was about 150, and the last round was over 275. It was crazy to see how involved people got as the contest continued!

This post was written by Andrew Jones, editor of Checkered Owl. It originally ran on his blog, but we loved it so much we felt it deserved to shared once more on ours. If you like his work and want to read more of his writing, or if you want to be super cool and offer him full time industry employment, reach out and connect with him on Twitter.

James Shotwell