Read a great article this morning in Mashable about the power of consumer contests and want to pass along the main points and emphasize their importance. There’s no easier way to engage audiences than to give away  free product and, as part of the giveaway, to engage people in a competition. When most people see the word “free” their eyes light up like a kid on Christmas morning; use this excitement to drive your business and grow your brand.

Here are the top points:

1) Contests help build your fan base – this is a no brainer… drive people to your site, expose them to your products or services, watch the sales come in.

2) Contests allow you to engage – given that consumer engagement is the top raison d’etre for using social media to drive your brand, it’s easy to see why using contests to drive consumer engagement is good. By using contest to engage your consumers you are exponentially increasing the number of people who are exposed to your brand.

3) Contests help you get consumer information – use your contest to learn about your audience, use that information to help better target your products and services, stay in touch, etc… OK, you get the picture.

4) Contests let consumers do the heavy lifting for you – the best giveaways are the ones that utilize social media and include some element of voting. So, for example, if you own an online cabinet store and you initiate a contest to give away a free kitchen cabinet makeover, install a voting component to the contest and make the contestants work for their prize. The more votes they get, the more exposure your cabinet store gets and the more people see your site. From the start of the contest to the time you select a winner, if done right, you could have exposed thousands of people to your site, shown them the value you offer over big box competitors and gotten top of mind for the next time they do a kitchen remodel.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the merits to well run online contests. But, a word of caution, as with anything you do in the marketing arena, make sure your contest looks professional, works like a well oiled machine and you follow through on all the commitments you make with the contest. Just as a contests is a great way to turn people on, any missteps will just as quickly turn people off.

To read the full article on Mashable, click here.