FAQs
Questions Answered
Frequently Asked Questions
Social Media Contests and Promotions?
Entry moderation can occur in a couple of ways. When entries are collected in your ShortStack list, you can set up a review process where you must “allow” an entry before it displays on your ShortStack campaign. We also offer digital rights management tools for hashtag contests.
We also provide captcha fields for both the entry form and the Voting Widget to help protect your contest.
Instagram doesn’t allow people to share content outside their platform to Instagram. This means you can’t just click a button on a website to share content to Instagram. Instead, people must post the content they want to share directly within Instagram. However, you can encourage sharing within Instagram through the use of hashtags and @ mentions.
Expect To Start Seeing Entries?
You can’t expect people to enter your contest if they don’t know about it. Promotion is key. Use ads, social media, emails, in-store promotions, and other methods to drive awareness and participation.
on Facebook?
Since Facebook doesn’t allow you to require people to Like your Page in order to participate in a contest, we suggest running contests, offering coupons/deals, and provide other meaningful content to draw people to your Page. Then, encourage people to follow your Page to be the first to know about upcoming contests and deals.
Yes, ShortStack allows you to embed campaigns on your website, blog or e-commerce platform. Running your campaigns on your own marketing channels allows you to generate brand awareness and promote sales.
Run an Instagram Contest?
You can run an Instagram hashtag contest on our Pro Plan and higher plans.
Someone Can Enter or Vote?
Certainly! You can restrict entry via:
Email address,
Facebook ID (Business Plan and higher plans)
Entries can be restricted to:
Once only
Once every X number of minutes/hours/days
A maximum of X entries
Voting can be restricted via the Voting Widget
Widget restriction options include:
Anonymous Fingerprint
Anonymous IP Address
Facebook ID (Business Plan and higher plans)
Mobile device login
The frequency of voting can be restricted to:
Once only
Once per entry
Once every X minutes/hours/days
Once per entry every X minutes/hours/days
We also provide captcha fields for both the entry form and the Voting Widget to help protect your contest.
Rules and Regulation?
ShortStack gives you the tools to stay compliant with online social media contest rules and regulations. However, it’s important to ensure you’re familiar with the guidelines for each platform you use when building your campaign.
Nope! Pay monthly or annually, but there are no extra fees tacked on. We also do not have fees for cancelling your subscription. For more information on all of the features you can have, visit our pricing page.
Sharing to Social Media?
There isn’t an option to reward entrants simply for sharing. However, we offer a refer-a-friend feature that rewards participants who share your contest with higher chances to win. When a referrer shares their referral URL and someone else clicks the URL and enters the contest, the referrer receives referral points/extra entries.
Build My Next Campaign?
The ShortStack platform was created as a self-service platform where customers can create their own campaigns. To help jump-start your campaign build, we offer a wide-range of professionally designed templates.
ShortStack is a great platform for video contests. If you want to display the entries on your campaign, you’ll need a contest-builder platform like ShortStack. Alternatively, if you are running a hashtag contest, entrants can simply include the video in their Instagram entry post.
Yes, we have a few options. For those with access to your ShortStack account, they can view the campaign in your Campaign Builder. Or, you can publish your campaign as a standalone landing page and share the URL with the clients or colleagues that don’t have access to your account. If you’re using our Teams feature, you can share campaigns with the account admin.
or Yearly Contests?
We suggest choosing a few different times a year to engage with your fans and run contests, create quizzes, send emails, etc. Why? Because repetition is important for brand awareness.
Need to run Another Campiagn?
Yes! We offer the ability to pause payments for up to 3 months. This is a great option if you run a contest every other month, or are taking a break for one reason or another. During the pause period, you will not have access to any part of ShortStack (entries, emails, the builder, etc), but you will not be charged. Your data will be stored and ready for your return!
ShortStack’s templates are professionally designed and fully customizable to fit your campaign and match your company’s branding. You can update the text and images, change the form fields, update the appearance using our Style Panel and the CSS Editor (available on the Business Plan and higher plans), and much more.
Instagram does not allow campaigns to be published directly to their platform. However, you can publish your campaign as a standalone landing page or embed it on your website, then post a link to the contest in your Instagram profile description and direct entrants to the link to enter. Alternatively, you can run an Instagram hashtag contest where people enter by including the contest hashtag (hashtag contests are available on our Brand and Enterprise plans).
for My Contest or Giveaway?
After you collect entries, you can choose a winner a few different ways. For entries collected into a ShortStack list, you could use our random entry selector to choose a random winner. For contests where entrants submitted a photo, video or text entry, you could determine a winner through public voting or ask a panel of judges (usually people at your company) to choose a winner.
Order to Use Shortstack?
Nope! ShortStack allows you to create online campaigns without the use of code. Use our widgets and Style Panel to build and style your campaign. If you do happen to be code-savvy, then you can use our Code Widget and CSS Editor to further customize your campaign.
to Create a Campaign
The time it takes to build a campaign depends on the type of campaign you plan to create. We offer professionally designed templates and themes to help save you time. This means that building something simple, like a giveaway, might only take a few minutes to set up. As a best practice, we suggest giving yourself plenty of time to create, test and promote your campaign before it goes live.
We suggest using Facebook to drive traffic to your contest instead of publishing your contest to Facebook. You can embed your contest on your website — as a landing page or as a pop-up — and then promote it on Facebook. We recommend keeping contests on your own properties because it gives you the freedom to run the contest your way, without worrying about Facebook’s restrictions.
There are a number of contest options available, including giveaways, hashtag contests, photo contests, etc. First choose the goal (e.g., engagement, lead collection, brand awareness) and prize to help you can determine the type of contest you want to run.
