The digital world is ever changing, and it is crucial for brands to stay up with what’s trending and to find new ways to stand out from the noise. One tactic that has become more popular and effective in recent years is a social media giveaway. Brands are using social media giveaways to recruit new followers, increase engagement rates, and build key relationships with influencers, media and guests.
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Giveaways are done by offering audiences something enticing that they might not purchase on their own, like a gift card with a good value, free services for a year or a package with branded merchandise. To enter a giveaway, the audience must engage in the brand’s social media by following the account, sharing the post, tagging social media friends in the caption, and more, to garner the maximum number of entries.
Grimaldi’s Pizzeria Social Media Coordinator, Halie Rocco, has been running social media giveaways for over 5 years and has learned a lot along the way. Below are a few insights on how to successfully run a restaurant’s social media giveaway.
Why Giveaways for Restaurants?
Whether you work for a fast-food chain, a local favorite, or an upscale restaurant, your guests all share one thing in common – the love for food! Running a giveaway on social media helps bring awareness to your brand by leveraging what your guests want, your delicious food! In turn, your brand’s social presence will increase, and more eyes will be focused on your brand.
Which Social Media Platform is Best for Giveaways?
Giveaways can be successful on every social media platform but it’s all dependent on who your audience is. If your followers are primarily Gen Z & Millennials, then try Instagram and TikTok to capture their attention. Facebook is an ideal platform to utilize if you primarily serve guests of an older demographic. Threads is a new platform that can be used to find new guests and run a giveaway. Understanding your audience and their needs will help you develop a better giveaway to drive results. Try a few different platforms and see what works best for them; sometimes trial and error is key.
How to Decide What to Give Away
Restaurants already have something they can give away, but there are many other ideas for gifts, too. Restaurants can work with other nearby businesses to build relationships and work together on a promotion. For example, this could be a date night package giveaway where winners receive a gift card for a restaurant for dinner, participate in an activity such as mini golf, bowling, or watching a movie and then end the evening with a gift card for a sweet treat. This allows businesses to combine audiences, therefore getting more traffic to their pages. At Grimaldi’s, we have teamed up with a movie theater for several summers where our followers enter to win a pack of movie tickets, drink vouchers, and gift cards to our restaurant. This past year, we saw a 30% increase in social media engagement during and after the giveaway.
Connecting the Giveaway with Other Marketing Strategies
Giveaways don’t have to be just a social media strategy – they can be a part of a multi-layered marketing campaign. One of the ways we have seen success is utilizing email to promote social media giveaways. This gives our email subscribers a way to connect with us and earn special rewards, while it opens a dialogue for us to engage with them more frequently and on a different channel. In a recent giveaway, we sent one email and within 48 hours, we increased our engagement on the giveaway social media post by 600% and saw a 13% increase in net follower growth.
Author: Halie Rocco is Grimaldi’s Pizzeria’s social media coordinator. For more information about Grimaldi’s Coal Brick-Oven Pizzeria, please visit www.grimaldispizzeria.com. Follow themon Facebook here, Instagram here or TikTok here.
