SwipeTown Academy

It takes careful planning and promotion.

Running a successful Facebook contest for your business doesn’t happen by luck.

But…if you do it right, they can be a great addition to your marketing strategy.

And the great news?

You can do it!

Why run a Facebook Contest?

What’s the value of running a Facebook contest? How will a contest help a business to market itself, and what else can you do with these social promotions?

Here are 10 top goals you can achieve through Facebook contests:

• Drive more traffic to your ecommerce store.
• Get more Facebook Fans.
• Crowdsource your product development.
• Get more engaged and loyal Fans.
• Increase brand awareness.
• Obtain greater insight into your Fans’ likes.
• Generate tons more new emails and leads.
• Get user-generated content (UGC).
• Gain immediate sales.
• Launch a new product or promote an event.

I have some key tips to help you get started:

Understand Facebook’s contest guidelines and Write T&Cs following Facebook guidelines

Yes, there are rules for competitions set by Facebook. It’s a good idea to familiarise yourself with Facebook guidelines, but I’ve highlighted the key points:

1. Things to mention in your competition T&Cs: competition time, who is organizing the competition, how can people participate, how the winner(s) will be contacted and what is the value of the price. Also, you have to note that Facebook is not in any ways involved in your competition.

2. Don’t ask customers to post their entries on their profiles. Instead, ask them to either comment the post, click reaction buttons or share their entry on your Facebook Page.

According to guidelines, asking the Facebook user to tag a friend in the comment is not okay – Facebook’s algorithm will try to identify posts like that and decrease the reach of the whole page (and not only the given post)!

Keep Things Simple

We’ve all gotten in the trap of being enticed by an online contest prize only to drop off after encountering an extensive entry process or never-ending rules. Don’t do this.

You will have a much larger volume of participants and likely much more buzz about your contest if participants find it enjoyable and easy to take part in.

Decide Your Goals

Like any marketing activity that you’re going to sink some time into, your Facebook contest should have a goal.

Decide what social media marketing goal you want to accomplish with the contest. Examples of goals driven by Facebook contests include:

• Collect email addresses for your email list.
• Get new customers.
• Get more followers.
• Host a class or event.
• Promote a sale or promotion.

Determine Your Ideal Customers

One common mistake we see businesses make with Facebook contests all the time is targeting anyone who can fog a mirror. Evidence? The iPad or iPhone giveaway.

The problem is, if you’re trying to appeal to everyone, then you could very well end up appealing to no one.

When it comes to settling on a prize, think about what would be relevant to your target market rather than something that is expensive and universally appealing.

Targeting specific demographics will increase the likelihood of attracting the right people to your contest.

Choose the Contest Type

Consider running caption, photo-vote, video-vote, and sweepstakes contests, which are always popular on Facebook.

Sweepstakes are the easiest to enter and the key to driving lots of entries is to pick the right prize.

Remember, you need to develop a contest that will help you reach your goals. Try a photo- or video-vote contest if your goal is to collect user-generated content.

Determine Budget and Choose Appropriate Prize

In order to increase value in your contests, you need to give away something that’s related to your business.

You can give away a gift card to your business, a product you sell, or a lifetime subscription to your content.

After all, if your hair salon gives away an iPad, you’ll get entrants who are interested in a free iPad, not necessarily your salon.

What’s more, those people will unsubscribe once the contest ends and not care about anything else related to your business.

Analyze your results

Facebook has a lot of really great tools in their “Insights” section that can tell you information like post engagement, page clicks, and page likes.

You can also see your top posts based on engagement level, date or reach.

These are great ways to determine the success of your Facebook contest, but you’re not limited to just these factors.

Check your survey to see how many people entered. Was the content they submitted good?

Take a look at the Facebook ads you ran in Ads Manager and see how many sales were a result of the contest.

Determine if the cost of the prize and the ads is worth the likes, engagement, or sales.

If the contest resulted in more revenue than money spent the decision is obvious.

Other times you have to put a value on likes and engagement and weigh it against the money you spent on the contest.

Top tips summarised

1. Pick Your Objective: What do you want to achieve through your competition? Engagement? Followers? Reach? This will craft your competition mechanics and what you want your audience to do to enter.
2. Choose Your Audience: If you know your audience clearly, you can ensure your messaging, artwork and any paid advertising spend, is directly targeting the right people.
3. Create Your Assets: People are more likely to take notice of your competition if it features rich media. These should be created beforehand in keeping with your audience and objective.