Are you using Pinterest to market your business?

Running contests on Pinterest is a great way to expose your brand to a large audience, attract new followers and engage with your existing follower base.

In this article, I’ll showcase nine businesses running successful Pinterest contests.

Why Pinterest Contests?

Here is why you should run a contest on Pinterest:

• Pinterest is the third most popular social network in the U.S. in terms of traffic.
• Pinterest has accumulated 14.9 million users as of July 2012.
• Pinterest is retaining and engaging users as much as 2-3 times more efficiently than Twitter was at a similar time in its history.
• Over 80% of pins are repins, demonstrating the tremendous “virality” at work in the Pinterest community.
• Pinterest accounted for 3.6% of referral traffic as of January 2012.
• Shoppers referred by Pinterest are 10% more likely to make a purchase than visitors who arrive from other social networks, including Facebook and Twitter.

Using Pinterest contests, your brand can engage with consumers in a personal and cost-effective way.

Contests can also help you collect customer information, preferences and feedback. This valuable data can then be put into action to enhance your offerings and acquire more customers.

So in this post, I’ll show you different types of Pinterest contests and examples to get you inspired to craft a Pinterest contest for your business.

Sweepstakes

Users can enter a Pinterest sweepstake by following a brand, creating a pinboard or by repinning an image. Winners are drawn randomly from the pool of eligible entries.

Below are the three examples of how companies are creating sweepstakes.

#1: AMC Theatres

The second-largest movie theater chain in North America, AMC Theatres is generating a lot of engagement through Pinterest contests.

AMC has created an entire pinboard, AMC Giveaways, dedicated to contests and giveaways.

Now users can just follow the specific pinboard to stay updated with the latest giveaways from AMC. The visually attractive pins direct users to appropriate contest landing pages.

AMC’s giveaway pinboard with visually attractive pins.

Landing pages contain contest details and an entry form. The entry form is best utilized by AMC collecting basic customer information and customer preferences.

Simple contest entry form collecting valuable customer information and preferences.

There are a lot of attractive giveaways offered by AMC from time to time on the pinboard to excite movie lovers. Prizes such as signed posters, free tickets, t-shirts and even a signed director’s chair are irresistible to the fans.

The most recent is a very special giveaway contest: The Dark Knight Rises custom Xbox 360 for The Dark Knight Rises. The interesting part is the user doesn’t even have to follow AMC on Pinterest or pin/repin an image to participate in the contest.

With contests, AMC is successfully promoting its brand, driving lots of engagement and collecting extremely valuable customer data.

Have a look at the number of social media shares and comments that the contest page has already received.

Contest details page with social sharing elements to reach a bigger audience.

Here are the details of the contest:

• Participants fill out an entry form at the AMC website before the deadline.
• Winners are selected at random.

Prize: The Dark Knight Rises custom Xbox 360. Unlike any other 360 consoles, this one is unavailable for purchase.

#2: British Midland International (BMI)

The airline company BMI (acquired by International Airline Group recently), kicked off BMI Pinterest lottery, a game of chance, on March 6, 2012. Rather than just posting the destination pictures, BMI converted its pinboards into a fun competition.

Creative use of pinboards and pins by BMI.

Different boards were created for different destinations, each containing nine pins, with a unique number on each image.

Additionally, the contest also included Tumblr. Each pin was linked to the brand’s Tumblr presence, BMIsocialplanet, where BMI showcased content for different BMI destinations from around the web.

Participants repin six images and at the end of the week, a winning number is drawn, with one random user winning the competition. Notice how BMI has incorporated the details of participation and relevant information in the pin description.

Great use of pin description with contest details in the copy.

This highly creative campaign, which ran for 7 weeks, resulted in 500k+ social media impressions in the first week alone, and generated lots of positive social media sentiment. More than 3000 entries were received for the contest in the first two weeks alone.