5 contest ideas for Halloween

The Event 🎃

Halloween is not just about scary costumes and glowing pumpkins; it's a perfect opportunity to capture your community's attention by leveraging the festive atmosphere. People are more motivated to participate in fun activities, and contests fit perfectly into this engaging environment. Organizing contests, giveaways, and raffles during this time maximizes your chances of attracting new followers, boosting engagement, and making your brand memorable.

All social media platforms are nice playgrounds to leverage: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube... Pick the ones that resonate with your brand and visual identity. The spooky creatives and playful atmosphere encourage participants to fully engage.

In a nutshell, Halloween is one of the perfect times to surprise & delight your followers and create more bonds with them!

Our Ideas 💡

To inspire you, here are some creative contest ideas we've brainstormed at Pickaw, which you can create in a few minutes on our platform to engage your community:

• 🎶 Spooky Playlist
• 🔪 Deadly Movies
• 👁️ Scary Vision
• 🧙‍♀️ Freaky Cosplay
• 🐈‍⬛ Creepy Kitty

Each contest is easy to set up and requires minimal effort, allowing you to focus on engaging your audience and having fun. So, get ready to create some Halloween magic with these ideas!

🎶 Spooky Playlist

Ask your community to comment with their best Halloween song to enter the contest!

If you’re looking to run a Halloween-themed contest, our Spooky Playlist idea is a perfect way to engage your community. Here are a few tips to make it a success:

1. Ask for song recommendations: Encourage your followers to share their favorite Halloween song in the comments. This keeps participation simple and accessible for everyone, even if they’re not typically contest participants.
2. Feature entries: Share some of the top suggestions in your stories (with sound! 😉). Featuring participants can build excitement and is a great way to show off the creativity of your community.
3. Add a twist: To make it more fun, ask people to explain why they picked that song. This can spark interesting conversations and provide more context, turning a simple contest into a lively exchange of ideas and memories.
4. Surprise & Delight: Offer your community an unexpected gift they will all win: create a playlist featuring the songs from the contest & share it with them. This tactic provides a true sense of belonging, and your community will remember it.

🔪 Deadly Movies

Ask your community to find the title of a movie by describing it with emojis!

If you want more, our Deadly Movies contest is a fun challenge where you ask your followers to guess a movie title using only emojis.

1. Ask your followers to guess: Post an emoji-based movie description and ask your community to comment with their best guess. Keep it simple but intriguing enough to make people think. The only limit is your imagination!
2. Encourage creativity: Let participants know they can also describe their own favorite horror or thriller movies using emojis and challenge others to guess. This turns a one-sided contest into an interactive game.

Do not worry about the designing part, our tool can handle that for you!

👁️ Scary Vision

Ask your community to share a scaring GIF to scare each other!

Our Scary Vision contest, where participants share their creepiest GIFs to spook each other, is a great way to stir engagement!

1. Ask for scary GIF submissions: Invite your followers to share a frightening or funny Halloween GIF in the comments.
2. Feature the best ones: Highlight some of the most creative or terrifying submissions in your stories or posts. This builds anticipation and showcases your community’s sense of humor (or fear factor!).
3. Keep it fair with clear rules: Once the entry period ends, do a random draw among all participants to choose a winner. Make sure to clarify that it’s not about having the scariest GIF, so everyone feels encouraged to join.

By leveraging visual content like GIFs, you can create more engagement and sharing.

🧙‍♀️ Freaky Cosplay

Ask your community to share their costume by text or image!

The Freaky Cosplay contest is a fantastic way to get your community involved and show off their Halloween spirit!

1. Ask for costume submissions: Invite your community to share their costumes by text or image—whether it’s a selfie in their spooky attire or a description of their creative concept. This opens up participation to everyone.
2. Showcase entries to build excitement: Feature some of the best, scariest, or funniest costumes in your stories or posts to inspire others and keep the engagement high.

For the boldest: You could enter the game yourself by using the winning costume as YOUR costume for Halloween! This would create surprise and follow up on the contest on the D-Day 🧙‍♀️.

🐈‍⬛ Creepy Kitty

Ask your community to guess the code to open the guarded pumpkin!

Want a more intellectual way to challenge your community this Halloween? Try our Creepy Kitty contest! Here’s how to set it up:

1. Create a code challenge: Ask your followers to guess the code to “unlock” the guarded pumpkin. This right code can be the answer to a quiz question or a completely random code. If you choose the random code option, we recommend you create a 3- to 4-digit code (no more), and make sure it’s something people can reasonably guess with a bit of luck and intuition 😉.
2. Announce clear rules: Make sure you specify how many digits the code has, especially in your creative.
3. Keep engagement high: Consider teasing hints regularly or narrowing down the number range to keep things engaging!

How to get it right?

All these contest ideas (& many more) are easy to set up and draw in a few clicks on Pickaw. By performing your social media contests with us, you are offering yourself more productivity and offering your community a fair and transparent winner selection. For each draw made on our platform, we provide a public verification page, easily accessible for you and your participants to prove the authenticity of the contest.

No more bad buzz or time-consuming winner selection.