Running a Facebook competition can be a great way to promote your brand and increase engagement with new and existing customers. Here’s our ten steps to making your Facebook competition a success.
1. Set your objectives and your budget
What do you want to achieve? Increased brand awareness? Promotion of a new product? More ‘likes’ on your page? More web hits? People’s email addresses? Think numbers – what increase to you want, and how much should this cost?
2. Decide if Facebook is the best place for your competition
Facebook’s not for every target market. For example if your target market is other businesses, you might be better off hosting the contest on your website. Plus competitions on any platform don’t work for all businesses. Should you run a competition to promote your brand?
3. Read Facebook’s competition guidelines
The rules of running a contest on Facebook are quite clear. And strict. Read Facebook’s dos and don’ts for running a competition before you start.
4. Pick the type of Facebook competition
Establish who, what, where, when and how can people enter.
5. Eyes on the prize
Set your prize. This needs to be attractive enough for people to enter, but of an equivalent value to the effort people need to make to enter, and to your objective. For example, if your aim is to get 1000 more hits a day on your website, pick a prize that is a similar value to 1000 additional hits. This might be calculated by average conversion value on your eCommerce website or, if you use Google Adwords, this should be fairly easy to measure.
6. Make the rules
Facebook rules and the UK prize competitions and free draws act mean you must clearly state the rules of the competition. This must include, for example, the closing date, limitations to number of entries per person, minimum age, residency restrictions.
7. Launch it and promote it
Promote the competition on Twitter, email newsletters, your website and forums, as well as offline in local media and at your business premises, for example on posters and till receipts. QR codes work well for offline promotion.
Investing £5-£10 per day in Facebook ads is also an affordable way to promote the contest (depending on your objective and budget!).
8. Close it
End the competition with a fanfare and be sure to contact the winner within the timeframe stated in your competition rules. Once the winner has been contacted, announce who they are (providing your rules stated they will allow this) and what they’ve won to all entrants with a thank you for entering message.
9. Promote it (again) & follow up
One of your objectives will always be for your competition to gain publicity and a competition winner makes a great news release to publish online and in local press. Try to include a picture of the winner with their prize if possible.
Now you’ve got a list of entrants, contact them again within a suitable timeframe to remind them of who you are and what you offer. If you’re doing this by email, ensure you include an ‘unsubscribe button’ (this is required for all email marketing).
10. Evaluate
Go back to your original objective and assess how well you met your targets, what worked well and what can be improved next time.
