How to Create a Viral Video Contest on Facebook

In this post you’ll discover how to create a video contest and learn the following:

Benefits of running online video contests

Do you want to dynamize your Facebook Page with multimedia content? Are you thinking of organizing an event where users upload videos from their smartphones? Or are you interested in obtaining content about your brand generated by your users?

Organizing a Video Contest provides the following benefits:

Multimedia content that speaks for your brand

Generating fun and creative new content is one of the fundamental requirements of any company or brand that cares about maintaining an online presence. It’s a way of attracting the attention of potential buyers and keeping the interest of those who are already customers of the brand. Organizing a video contest enables you to collect a large quantity of multimedia content about your products or brand that you can then reshare on social media.

No technological barriers

Creating a video contest with Easypromos is very simple and requires no special programming knowledge. The tutorials, help icons, and an online support center will help you throughout the process. Don’t worry about the multiple video formats – the application will take care of the whole technical process so that all the videos, regardless of format, can be uploaded to and played from the gallery. This leaves you worry-free.

Extra-easy participation

Smartphones make recording a video as simple as taking a photo. And, as our platform is smartphone compatible, the participants can even enter the contest from their mobile devices. It’s also possible to participate directly from Instagram or Twitter. Users enter your contest by uploading videos with your branded hashtag to their Instagram or Twitter accounts. Videos are highly popular with both, contest participants and the wider public. So don’t limit yourself to a photo contest – let your users really express themselves with a video.

Generate engagement

Users that create and consume audiovisual content use other channels than Facebook to communicate and keep themselves entertained. For this reason, there are different options for linking or uploading videos to the video contest app. Users might find it more convenient to link their YouTube videos, rather than upload them again. Or, if they often share videos on Instagram or Twitter, they’ll be grateful for the option of participating directly from their favorite social media channels. You also activate the voting system to maximize the viral reach and the visibility of your contest.

Capture new leads

Videos are a form of content that is often shared. This is a great advantage when it comes to disseminating your contest. Encourage participating users to share their entry on social media networks in order to collect more votes. Apart from spreading your branded contest, you will also get to collect new leads for your marketing purposes, as in order to vote users must leave their full name and email address. This way they become part of your database and you’ll be able to strengthen the relationships by contacting them with special offers and new promotions.

Try the Video Contest DEMO to test the user experience and find out how easy it is to collect user-generated content and new leads with the Easypromos application.

Characteristics and features of the Video Contest application

Easy participation

There are four different ways to participate in an Easypromos video contest. And you can enable all four of them:

• Uploading a video directly (Video Hosting Extension needed)
• Sharing a YouTube link
• Sharing a Vimeo link
• Publishing an Instagram or Twitter video with the defined contest hashtag (enabling hashtag-entry via integration with Instagram/Twitter)

Video gallery

You can make all the entries public so that users can share them and vote for them. The videos can be played in the gallery, independently of their source of origin. You can choose between two gallery layouts to show the videos: the vertical gallery or the tiled gallery.

Intuitive user experience

The interface has been designed to make the participation process highly intuitive. Participants who enter via the application fill in the registration form and are then asked to upload or their video. The participant will receive confirmation that the video has been uploaded successfully.

Responsive

A large part of the traffic to promotions comes from mobile devices, and video contests are especially attractive to smartphone users. The platform uses a responsive template which means that participants enjoy a seamless user experience when using mobile devices. This applies to submitting or voting for an entry. Check all the features of our responsive template.

Customize the registration form

Apart from requesting basic personal data (name, email, telephone, date of birth, city, and country), you can collect obtain information by enabling additional text fields or dropdown menus.

Videos in the original version

If your objective is to obtain audiovisual material in its original format, you should enable the Video Hosting Extension.

Contest with combined content

If you’re looking to attract as many participants as possible, then you should look for varied content. Don’t ask users only to upload videos as it might become a participation barrier. Encourage them to share videos, photos, or even written texts!

Notifications in real-time

If you wish, you can receive an email informing you of each new participation. This helps to keep you informed about contest activity at all times, giving you the chance to be proactive with users and quickly disseminate each video uploaded by participants.

Pre-moderation of videos

You can activate the option of moderating and validating participations before they are published in the gallery. All participations will be collected by the application, but they won’t be displayed in the gallery until you validate them.

Voting contest

Videos can be shared easily and are highly popular with internet users. Take advantage of it and base your video contest on votes. This means that each participant helps to promote the contest, by sharing their video with their family and friends, in order to obtain more votes.

The best thing about voting contests is that you get to export voters’ information and therefore add them to your mailing list. That’s freshly obtained leads for your database!

Fraud control measures

Although voting contests are one of the most effective ways of increasing engagement with your community and achieving more entries, it can lead to fraud in the fight for votes. That’s why Easypromos developed their own anti-fraud system which checks each vote on 11 different control points. You can learn much more about the Easypromos anti-fraud control here.

Sharing options

The application offers users the option to share the promotion. From the gallery, users can share a specific entry or the whole gallery. The multimedia nature of videos makes them a good focal point for attracting new participants and voters.

Managing the promotion dates

If you want your contest to combine videos and voting you can establish different periods for each action by managing the promotion dates. In this case, preconfigure the entry date for uploading videos and establish a voting period that will begin after all entries have been submitted.

Contest customization

The Easypromos applications allow you to fully customize the contest application. It means that you can expose your audience to your corporate image while they participate in your promotion. You can also have a video as your main image or contest description, and you can customize each page of the promotion. You can read more about our Premium Design Template.

Categories contest

You can use the categories feature so that users can enter the contest according to a specific theme, city, or based on their age, etc. This means that when a user uploads a video, he/she can indicate which category their video belongs to. In the contest’s public gallery, the videos can then be filtered into different categories so that they can be seen and voted for according to their theme.

Obtain participants’ data.

Users have to fill in the registration form with the information that you wish to collect. You can download the data at any time, even once the promotion has finished, to an Excel file or you can configure to send it to your CRM system via one of the available options.

Contact the participants

Thank users for their effort by sending them an automatic email using the Email platform included in the promotion app. You will already have the email address of the users who filled in the registration form, and you can even synchronize the list of participants with your email marketing software, using one of our Integrations. You can contact those who have participated via a hashtag by sending them a predefined message, either automatically or manually, and you can also send emails to the winner and non-winners.

Display the contest on your website

If you want the visitors of your website to be able to participate in the contest, you can embed the promotion on your website or blog. The steps are very simple and entering the contest via an embedded widget is exactly the same as entering via the link to the contest.

Select the winners

Select the winners randomly with the random selecting tool which is available in all versions of the app or filter the finalists by a number of votes. Decide how many prizes you want to give away. Also, a certificate of validity will be generated, confirming that the giveaway has been carried out automatically and randomly. This will help you assure participants of the transparency of the sweepstakes. Read more about the prizes system here.

Publish winners

You can create a page within the promotion containing a list of prizes and the winners. Simply share a direct link that you can disseminate easily and rapidly via your usual communication channels.

If you need examples or inspiration, you can read the following post with 12 ideas for video contests.

To set up the video contest you can use the following tutorial which will take you through it step by step. And in case of doubts or questions, you can always contact us via our Online Chat.