The language of social media contests: A lexical analysis of contests across social platforms

Contests play an important role in social media content created and facilitated by users generally, and by brands and marketers specifically, in the drive for continued communicative engagement and online participation. This study assesses the language of social media contests by capturing more than 30,000 social media posts relating to contests, and performing a lexical analysis on them to identify major linguistic themes. The findings reveal a mixture of persuasive language tropes, gratitude linkages and platform-specific behaviour across social media contest posts. Implications include the utilisation of social contest language for brand strategy.