Want to get hundreds of comments, shares and likes for your Facebook page?
Facebook competitions are a fun, interactive and relatively easy way to increase user the amount of user engagement your page receives such as likes, share and comments. You’ll find people will even comment on your competition posts just to you give you some love, telling you how great they think you are followed with an abundance of smileys.
So what are you waiting for?
With a little bit of careful planning, and for a really small investment, Facebook competitions can be an extremely effective marketing tool. The fact is competitions attract positive content for your Facebook page, helping to you to increase brand awareness, user engagement across all social media platforms and build up brand identity.
And eventually, help drive more sales and improve your SEO.
Here are a few tips to help you get started:
1. Know your Audience
Who do you want to target? Use Facebook stats, in conjunction with what you already know about your market, to pick out a demographic. Facebook insights will give you the age, gender, location and primary language of the people who like your page. It’ll also show you your most successful posts from the past – so you’ll know what gets users excited, meaning you can intelligently plan a promotion which will spark emotional involvement.
2. How to choose the best prize
Stick to generic prizes relevant to your brand, that the customer can relate to and see value in – like gift vouchers for a department store. It’s widely regarded in the social media world; competitions with the highest level of user participation are those offering a number of small, highly sought after prizes for example, competitions giving user the chance to win £20 Nandos vouchers tend to be very successful. And it’s because users already have an emotional connection with the brand. But also it’s down to the psychology of small prizes. High ticket prizes can be attention grabbing, and often have a high sharability factor - so don’t rule them out, if the prize is desirable and on brand you could create a great buzz. But a similar level of engagement can be achieved using smaller prizes; the psychology is simple, smaller prizes seem more obtainable so people are much more likely to take the time to enter. And if you’re shelling out for a prize, that’s important to bear in mind.
3. Choose a nationally recognised company to partner with
Competitions tend to get much more engagement when you team up with a well-known brand. You could give them brand exposure in return for a free prize. People get excited when they see you’ve joined forces with a household name, it gives you a certain level of kudos in the eyes of the customer, and in turn, increases the amount of comments, shares and likes any related posts will receive
4. Legal
Check out the Facebook terms of service during the planning stage, to ensure what you plan to do is actually legal. Facebook will in no way endorse your promotion, so this must be clearly stated. You must include the competition rules, age restrictions and any restrictions within the terms and conditions. Also Facebook insist you add the caveat, ‘Entering this competition is considered complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant.
5. Types of competition, platforms and tools
There are 5 basic types of Facebook competition.
Think about want you aim to achieve, quickly you want to see the results and how many people you want it to reach. The simplest, requiring no specialist tools is the ‘Like to Win’ competition. Simply choose any post, image, image or link and ask your users to like it.
To maximise results and shares, pick a quirky image, exciting new product or a meme. This one is great for creating a sudden surge in engagement. But for a much wider reach, try the ‘Comment to Enter’ approach - follow the steps above, but stipulate entry via comments. This is great for gaining customer insights. Who needs market research? A combination of these is the ‘Like and Comment’ competition, giving users two entries for double participation.
Next, is the ‘Answer to Win’, pick a fun question for your user to answer. For maximum results and to enhance the possibility of shares, pick a trending topic to help give your brand a personality. One of the most rewarding campaigns is the ‘Photo/video Comments’ competitions, producing some some eye catching and sharable user generated content. Simply post a video, picture or status update and ask your users to comment. This is has fantastic engagement potential but be careful, you may want to pre-vet entries/constantly check for any inappropriate entries.
A fantastic free tool to help you sift through the entries and randomly pick a winner is the heyo Timeline Contest Creator App.
6. Don’t just post it and hope for the best
Reengage your users with reminders and they will reengage you, telling you they’ve entered and shared – meaning even more comments and likes. Take a multi-platform approach, the competition may be on Facebook, but you can promote it via other channels to give it a bit more of a push, and engage users on those platforms. Shorter competitions are good for creating a spike in activity. But if you’re building your page from nothing, longer competitions are better for attracting more page likes. Once you’ve got a few hundred users on board, the optimum for a giveaway/prize draw competition would be a week. Photo contests are ideal for longer campaigns.
By Matt Jones, Content & Blog Writer at myvouchercodes.
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