Facebook timeline contests are becoming a very popular social media strategy. Being a social media marketer myself, I understand that sometimes it’s really difficult to reach your social media goals by posting even quality and diversified content.
Different contests reach different goals. We will discuss each in detail. Before you start, ask yourself a question: “What social media goals do I actually have?”
So, before you start launching a Facebook contest, you should understand your social media business goals and have a full, realistic picture of your page. By this I mean your number of fans, your target audience and that page’s engagement level. Sometimes you may need to have several “beginner” timeline contests to get ready for the “advanced” video contests.
Below I offer 4 popular types of contests you can run directly from your timeline, and pick your winners with ease. First we will discuss each type of contest in detail and then I will show you how to create a Facebook Sweepstakes from scratch.
Let’s take a look at the new Facebook contest rules. You can learn the whole list of Dos and Don’ts here but I made it a bit easier for you.
What you can ask your fans to do:
What you cannot ask your fans to do:
Sweepstakes and giveaway are the easiest to enter and the key to driving lots of entries is to pick the right prize to offer.
Good For:
Contest Ideas:
See a great example of this idea performed by Sleepy People.
You can run one – three condition contest – like PromoRepublic did for our Christmas sweepstakes.
In it, we asked users to like us, like the post, and write a comment. We’ve got almost 200 post likes, 1,000+ page likes, and 170+ comments.
TIP: While you can ask for three actions, like we did, don’t make the call to action complicated. The easier the conditions are, the higher your chances are to get more people to participate.
The major downside to using your timeline for sweepstakes and giveaways instead of an app to run this type of contest is that selecting a winner can be difficult. After posting your status update, you’ll need to choose a winner once the deadline to enter the contest has passed. As we’ve already discussed, likes (page and post) and comments work best as the mission of these contests is to increase any or all of them.
So, how do you fairly pick a winner when the contest post gets thousands of likes and comments? When timeline contests start getting popular, app providers have tools to manage contests and make it easier to select a winner. I’ve done a research and chose 2 apps, both do a great job addressing the challenges of running timeline contests.
Quizzes are great to interact with your followers. It’s especially good to offer your customers a chance to interact with your page in a more meaningful way than likes and random comments. For this type of contest, you need to ask questions related to your industry, products, and services. Use this contest type to showcase your least known features, services and to educate your customers.
Good for:
Contest Ideas:
Coffee shops may ask about some unique sorts of coffee, REALTORS® may consider questions about antique buildings in town, automotive business clients will like quizzes about Formula 1 winners and other racing events.
This is a great way to boost your brand awareness and spread the word about it. Ask questions about the year your company was founded, the origin of your company name, the specific countries your staff is from, and the crazy style of your office Christmas party. I have a hard time reigning in my imagination! So, you shouldn’t stop yours!
Quizzes like this will help you connect better to your clients, and that’s the whole point of social media marketing.
This type of quiz will let you not just promote your updates to a bigger audience, but also helps you understand what your customers expect from your business. You can learn a lot about what potential updates are most important to your users by analyzing the responses you get.
We at PromoRepublic asked participants to guess what feature we will launch next. I’ll show you how to create this quiz from scratch at point #8 How To Run A Quiz (Example).
TIP: The quiz contest can filters a keyword or a set of keywords. It’s always better to propose a defined set of possible answers to make sure the spelling of your keyword or phrase will match. So, when you create this type of content, you could say “What update will we bring you next? Will it be more integrations, updated filtering options, or more analytics? By giving them options, you can filter by keyword, and if they post a response that isn’t in the defined set of answers, you know that update is important to them. Win-win.
Photo Contests are an easy way to entice users to upload a photo and have the community vote on their favorite to win (ask them to Like the comments) With the popularity of camera phones these days, taking a photo is a very easy thing for most users to do. Studies show that user-generated content will be big in 2017, so this is a great time to run a photo contest.
Good For:
Contest Ideas:
This idea of photo contest will work for clothes brands, accessories etc. Any product or even service that people will take with themselves all the time. Think of the Travelocity garden gnome.
This works for stores, cafes, restaurants, and hotels.
TIP: Create your contest hashtag. This can be a very efficient way to spread the word about your business, contest, and location for free.
With this photo contest you will gain more participants since they won’t have to be physically present in the store to enter. They can participate right from the comfort of their own home.
Here’s how Sarah Brightman encouraged fans to see what merchandise might have with her name or face on it.
Try to have your contests on special days and holidays. This will allow you to offer thematic gifts. If you don’t want to miss important dates, subscribe to PromoRepublic and get access to daily updated content calendar with layers. There you can manage your industry choices and see only relevant special days, holidays, and trends for your business.
If we are talking about quizzes as your company promotion, it’s ok to offer your participants coupons, promo codes, vouchers, subscriptions or any other things connected to your industry.
TIP: Gift cards are always a good idea. Think of Amazon gift cards and Netflix subscriptions.
Once you learnt how to run a sweepstakes, giveaway, quiz, and photo contest, it’s time to promote it. There will be organic growth from entrants sharing with friends, but you will need a few promotional boosts in the beginning to create the initial seed.
Here are 3 methods to promote your contest:
They will be the most likely to enter and share with friends to help jump-start your contest if the news is delivered right to their inbox.
Share on Twitter, Instagram and anywhere else you have a social presence. This is a great way to introduce users from other networks to your Facebook page and get them hooked more into your brand.
This is a great way to reach new customers outside of your current community. I do recommend that you boost every contest on Facebook. In the example below you will see a step by step guide how to boost your contest.
I hope I explained all the benefits of the contests above and you can choose one that will fit your social business goals. Now I want to show you how to run a quiz: from creating a visual to boosting it on Facebook.
So, the steps are:
Let’s create a quiz for company promotion and have PromoRepublic as an example. We will ask participants to guess what feature we will launch next.
I always use PromoRepublic to create any type of post. With its graphics editor it takes me less than 5 minutes to create a beautiful visual post.
TIP: Facebook now allows you boost pictures with 20%+ text in them, but it also does cut the number of people who could see them. Try to use just a call to action on your contest picture, and post the text above the image in the text box.
Choose last two options if you have <1000 fans of your page. If less – edit “people you choose through targeting”
All these points are different for every business.
2 Interests will be enough. The more you funnel the interests the smallest audience will be targeted.
Below you will see the number of estimated people reached. Try to set a $10 campaign for two days.
You can pay with credit card, PayPal or online banking.
You can monitor the success of your post with PromoRepubic’s Statistics. Where you will see the organic and advertising views, clicks, visits and other indicators.
As you can see, it’s easy to run a contest on Facebook, as long as you come up with a prize that people want and the right combination of text and visuals to get your point across. Facebook users are engaged, active and they like to interact with brands. Make your brand more interesting by posting contests and watch your engagement soar!
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