If you’ve been looking for a way to draw visitors back to your site, to get users engaged and to build or strengthen a community of customers, you’ve got to try a contest. Set up a poll to capture votes, have users submit photos, questions, or stories, or you can hinge the contest on niche-related trivia. Contests are a great way to build interest, excitement and connect with your audience.

Elements of Success

First, you should know that in some states, sweepstakes are actually a form of illegal gaming. Just in case your hometown frowns on that form of promotion, you should know what constitutes a sweepstakes contest.

There are three elements to a sweepstakes: Something of value is given away, the winning is selected by chance, and the contest entry must provide consideration. Only if all three elements are present is the contest a sweepstakes.

You can make sure your promotion isn’t a sweepstakes by including ‘Free Entry,’ or ‘No Purchase Necessary,’ in the conditions.

Reward Sharing

You can also use a different form of contest completely. Polling, voting, and trivia are great ways to engage your audience and reward users for contributing, and they aren’t considered sweepstakes as the winner is not selected by chance or at random.

You can set up a poll for your users to vote on brand preferences or product uses. If the user’s selection wins, they get a prize. Polling and voting is used by big brands like MTV, Pepsi, and Levi’s.

Personalized Promos

You can also ask your users to submit their stories or photos as a part of the contest. Maybe it’s the top five best uses for your product, or it’s an inventive photo of the customer and the product, or an imaginative ad campaign suggesting a new way to see the product. Whatever the setting, you are asking users or customers to connect with you, your product and your company. This will give you a better sense of what your audience is thinking and enable them to connect with your business in a meaningful way.

You don’t have to worry about this promo being a sweepstakes because any winners won’t be chosen at random. You don’t even have to select just one winner, if the feedback is fantastic, you can pick a weekly winner, or award the prizes to as many contestants as you’d like.

Prize Ideas

You can give away all sorts of things as prizes; coupons, discounts, reports, eBooks, products, etc. Be creative and resourceful, but consider the level of engagement your contest requires and try to match that prize-wise. This is a chance to build up your brand and business reputation, so make sure contestants get something they deserve.

What contest will you be testing out?

My News

You can personalize your view of Digg with their ‘My News’ feature. You can select profiles to follow, and you’ll see the latest submissions listed under the ‘My News’ tab. Picking up on Twitter language, you choose to ‘follow’ the profiles, as you can see here:

So when you click on the ‘My News’ tab you see a personalized Digg:

This can help you stay up-to-date on the latest postings in your niche, and it means that you don’t have to fight for the front page. When users log into Digg, ‘My News’ is their homepage, which means your followers will see your stories

Now instead of trying to convince your customers and contacts to ‘Digg’ each individual video or article, you can just ask them to follow you on Digg, as they would on Twitter or ‘friend’ you on Facebook. Then your content gets listed and they can easily click on a link back to your site.

Digg It, and Who Dugg It

Digg has also made it clearer and easier to add content. The ‘Digg it’ button is bigger, and the title and any images are immediately imported. All you have to do is write a description and select a topic. The site will also let you know if the content you’re Digg-ing has already been submitted, and ask you if you want to Digg it.

While you can’t see who submitted content anymore, you can see which of your friends did Digg it.

Take a moment and check out the new Digg, then let us know what you think!

This is where Twitter and WeFollow come in. WeFollow is a website that is a Twitter directory of sorts.

You can search by keyword and find Twitters who have identified themselves as connected with the query. For example, here’s what a search for ‘exercise’ turned up:

Now you have a list of people who are tweeting in your niche, and a count of their followers, including a breakdown of how many are new, so you can see whether their influence is growing or has reached a plateau.

WeFollow gives you a good list of leads people you should start building relationships with to increase your backlinks. You can start by following them, and check out their websites. Reach out to them; let them know if you like their content, or if you retweet their tweets. Once you’ve established more of a connection or pattern of communication, you can request a backlink.

Don’t just go for the clear leaders, those with the most followers. You might find that it’s harder to get a backlink from those with millions of followers, than someone who has just thousands. Authority sites are great, but diverse sources provide power for your optimization efforts as well.

We’ve specified Spezify to help you figure out who you should be working with to power up your links and improve your SEO efforts.

Spezify is a brainstorming tool that presents you with pictures, video, tweets, comments, articles, and more all related to your word of choice. Here’s an example of the tool at work with the word ‘fashion’:

The content is linked, and bubbled with an explanation of how the link was found. This can help you find out who’s doing what in your niche, how to find them and who’s linked to whom.

The site tool searches across all content and media types, which is why you’ll see Flickr results and YouTube videos as well as tweets and authority sites. The results page also differs from your standard search engine in its layout. The results are not listed in a hierarchy, but more like a bulletin board of relevant information. You can scroll up as well as down, and side to side and move diagonally by holding your click and moving the cursor.

You can click directly on your results, as you would with any search engine results, and when you do two options appear. You can save a specific result by clicking on the star icon. This saves the result to your favorites collection, which can be viewed by clicking on the match star icon on the top right-hand corner.

You can also link directly to a search result by clicking on the chain icon. This displays the Spezify link to the result and you can cut and paste as you’d like. Here’s an example from a search on ‘dogs’:

You can filter your results by content and media type, so you don’t have to look through Flickr photos for text results.

Spezify is worth testing out because of the large range of the results. This means you can find new sites, new Twitter-ers and new content in your niche that you can connect to. And, since it’s free to use, there’s no excuse not to test it out!

Say It in Style

You need to be responsive to your customers and potential customers. But you should be responsive in a way that further established your brand. Now more than ever, with social media and social networking, you can stylize your communications.

Here are some models for you to see what we means and help you figure out your own engagement style:

Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
Of course, you’re not going to give anyone a million dollars, but this customer engagement model hinges on contests, giveaways and freebies. Take a look at Virgin Atlantic’s Twitter for examples.

Remember, the giveaway engagement works best when you’ve established a trustworthy relationship with your audience; otherwise you can seem like one of the multiple marketing scammers out there. So alternate your contests with substantive tweets or useful information.

Customer-Centric
This customer engagement model is pretty standard. It fits folks who are using social networking and social media sites to monitor customer satisfaction and answer any questions. This is more of a response style than a statement. Staples’ Twitter is a good example of this style.

Remember, if you’re going this route, answering all (real) tweets, pings, comments and questions is essential. The responses should feel personal, so skip the cut and paste. Be prepared to handle bad reviews and complaints diplomatically and publically, which means being polite and professional. This style is all about diplomacy and personability.

Social-izer
This customer engagement model hinges on thinking of your customers and contacts as like-minded people who need a place or a way to connect. That’s where you come in.
The idea is to engage your audience by talking about something you and your audience cares about and establishing a link to your company’s brand by doing so. Timberland’s Earthkeepers is a good example of this style. Going with the outdoorsy aspect of their audience, they focus on environmentalism and establish a connection between sustainability and positive environmental action and their brand.

Remember, with this style, it’s not about you per se; it’s about the issue generating the community sentiment. That means the content from your should inspire a response, be valuable, and thoughtful.

These are just three styles to get you thinking. What customer engagement styles do you notice? What are some favorites? Tell us in the comments below,