Facebook has always allowed contests from third parties as long as they follow the social network’s official promotions guidelines. These include, among others, that Facebook should be released from all responsibility, that the contest is not sponsored by Facebook etc. And another important point is that the personal timelines should not be used in order to enter in a prize draw etc.
Facebook Timeline Contests
The most simple way to run a contest on Facebook is still to organize a timeline contest, in Easypromos terms also known as Facebook Giveaway. This consists of a post on your Facebook page where you ask users to participate either by commenting on the post or Liking the post. No sign up process, everything takes place on your Facebook page. So not only is it easy for you as the page administrator to carry out, it’s also very easy for the users to participate and a sweepstakes increases the organic reach of the post exponentially. A study shows that a sweepstakes post gets up to 1000% more interaction than a regular post on Facebook. All of this is the reason why the Facebook Timeline contest is the most used type of promotion of all.
Apart from being nice and raffle a prize, you can use the Facebook sweepstakes to ask the users many things, only your imagination sets the limits. You can ask which product they like the most, their favorite color, food, season, activity etc. They can even answer with a hashtag and the platform will track and count the different hashtags used in the comments on the sweepstakes post.
Easypromos offers the perfect Facebook Timeline contest tool to easily select the winner or winners and the alternates randomly and transparently, we even give you a certificate of validity to guarantee to the users that the prize draw has been carried out in a fair and random way.
Dos and Don’ts in Facebook Timeline Contests
Dos:
- Ask users to participate by Liking or Commenting on the post
- Ask users to participate by using reactions. Remember: Only use Reactions in the way they’re originally intended for Facebook – as a quick and easy way to express how you feel.
- Ask participants to use hashtags in their comments.
- Be original in what you ask users to answer, something that can be useful to your business.
- Encourage users to follow your page and share the sweepstakes post
Don’ts
- Ask users to share as a requirement for participation
- Ask users to tag friends as a requirement for participation
- Ask users to Like your page as a requirement for participation
- Use reactions as a voting mechanism or to represent anything than what they’re originally intended for
You can read much more about Facebook Timeline Contests here. And if you already know that you want to run a Facebook Sweepstakes, you can sign up here to get started.
App-based promotions published on Facebook
If you want to collect the user data of the participants and make them work a little more for their chance to win, you should create a promotion using an app. For example, all the Easypromos contests and promotions that are app-based can be published on Facebook. When you create an app-based promotion, a microsite with its unique URL is created and you can use it to share the promotion anywhere you want. A good idea is to publish it in one or more posts on your Facebook page that is visible to everybody, and you can even pin the post to the top of the page.
Users connecting from a mobile device will be taken to the microsite because the tabs aren’t available in the mobile version of the Facebook app. All entries go into the same database. But don’t worry, all our apps are 100% responsive and therefore perfectly visualized on any mobile device.
The different options to create a Facebook contest:
Simple sweepstakes with registration
If all you want to do is to collect the data of the participants in exchange for a chance to win a prize, you should use the entry form giveaway app. This consists of a welcome page, the entry form page that you can configure to ask for the data needed, and the thank you page, that simple. The app comes with the tool to pick a winner randomly.
Photo, video and text contests
Some of the most popular contest apps are the ones for photo and video contests where users sign up and upload their photo or video. The organizer can choose to combine both and also to ask the users for a caption to go with their photo or video. Pure writing-based contests are also an option. The user-generated content can be published in a public gallery where you can activate voting to find the winner of the competition or to pick the finalists.
Users can vote directly into the entries’ gallery and participants are offered several ways to share their entry to get votes.
Surveys and quizzes
A very good way to engage with your target audience and get to know their likings, preferences and habits is to create questionnaires such as a survey, multiple-choice test or quiz. You can mix the types of answers; single answer, multiple answer, sortable answers, open answer, ranking, list, radio buttons, dropdown list. You can use images and videos both in questions and answers. You can show the users their answers in the summary page and let them take the quiz again and you can show final messages to the users based on their answers. That way you can give the participants added value by for example guiding them in their purchase process.
The same goes for this type of promotion; participation takes place on the microsite and users have several ways to share their result of the survey, test or quiz.
Coupons and codes
If you want to incentivize your online community to purchase more of your products and at the same time collect database, a good way to do it is by using coupons and codes. The users sign up, fill in their data and in return they get a discount coupon or code that they can redeem at the point of sales. Or you can give them a small gift to be picked up at the store.
Are you ready to create your own Facebook Contest? Which one is it going to be? Create your free account and get started here. You can create the promotion in draft mode at no cost, you will only be asked for payment once you want to activate it.
