Types of Facebook Contests
Facebook contests are a great way to engage your fans, increase your likes and collect email addresses. They make it easy to get people sharing about your brand and driving first-time visitors to your Facebook Page.
Which types of Facebook contests are right for your business ?
There are plenty of contests that you can run for your business. Choosing the right ones can help maximize the efficiency of them for your business. Do you want to increase fans? Increase engagement? Reward business advocates? Do you have 3 fans or do you have 35,000 fans? Lets look at some helpful pointers on how you can achieve successful campaigns.
To get you started, we are going to show you 3 types of Contests your can run on your Facebook Page:
1. Starter Contests (for Pages with a low level of engagement) 2. Intermediate Contests (for Pages with a medium level of engagement) 3. Advanced Conctests (for Pages with a high level of engagement)But first, ask yourself these two questions before deciding which type of contest is right for you:
What is your goal from this type of contest?
New Facebook fans & increase my email list: For this goal a Sweepstakes is best. It’s simple and it has a very low barrier to entry. This option will maximize your number of entrants.
Make immediate sales: To do this you can run a group offer, or offer a coupon to push users to buy right away.
Build a bank of user-generated content to have users vote on and use in the future: This can easily be done by running a Photo, Video or Pinterest Contest.
How much engagement do you currently have on your Page?
Low Engagement: (< 100 people talking about you in the past week) If you have under 100 people talking about you in the past week that means that your fans are not very engaged with your Facebook Page and/or you don’t have a very large fan-base to begin with.We recommend running a Starter Contest – which include Sweepstakes and Vote Contests – which have very low barriers to entry and will entice a higher percentage of entrants than a contest that requires them to submit a photo or video. Medium Engagement: (100 – 1000 people talking about you in the past week) This level of engagement means you have a fanbase with enough life of engagement to run a starter or intermediate contest successfully. These only require a small amount of work or thinking on behalf of your fans. High Engagement: (> 1000 people talking about you in the past week) If you have over 1000 people talking about you in the past week, then you are in prime position to run an Intermediate or Advanced contest. These require users to create something more time consuming or make a purchase to enter. See a full list of different contest options below:
1. Starter Contests
Starter Contests have the lowest barrier of entry to any contest. Users simply need to enter their contact info and click a button to enter:
A Sweepstakes is the simplest type of contest – users submit their email address, click ‘Enter Contest’ and they’re entered into a random drawing for a prize. This is the best type of contest to start with if you have low engagement on your Facebook Page. A Vote Contest is the easiest way to get users to interact with your brand in a personal way. These can be used to vote for which products should appear in your next product line or go on sale next season.2. Intermediate Contests
Intermediate Contests require users to submit a piece of user-generated content to enter your contest, but the type of content is easy enough for most users to create:
Photo Contests are an easy way to entice users to upload a photo and have the community vote on their favorite to win. With the popularity of camera phones these days, taking a photo is a very easy thing for most users to do. To maximize entries, choose a photo theme that is easy for most users to get a photo of. Also – photos are the best type of content, as they are eye-catching and easy to digest, so this is the most recommended type of contest that requires user-generated content. Photo Caption Contests entice users to write a caption (title) for a photo that you upload to enter. The community then votes on their favorite to win. This is an easy way to take advantage of online memes, which are becoming extremely popular on sites such as Reddit and 9GAG. An Essay Contest is a great way to get entrants to submit their thoughts, feedback and stories for a chance to win. You can have entrants write about an experience they had using one of your products or at one of your physical locations. The community can then vote on their favorite to win.3. Advanced Contests
Advanced Contests require users to upload a more time-consuming piece of content or actually pay money to get something. This will require a very large audience (over 10,000 fans minimum) to be successful, as only a very small percentage of users will take the time to enter:
Entice users to create a video and submit it to win a prize. This is bit harder to do than simply taking a photo, but it has the potential to give you great user content for your brand. Just like in Photo Contest, the community votes on their favorite to win.
Pinterest Contests entice users to create a board on Pinterest and submit the link to enter. The community then votes on their favorite to win. This is a great contest option, as it gives your brand reach on both Facebook and Pinterest.
A Group Offer is a great way to get users to pay money right away in order to take advantage of a limited-time offer. These offers normally require offering a minimum discount of 40% off a regularly-priced item in order to make them attractive enough for users to purchase right away.
Increase your Facebook Likes today. Try a Facebook Contest free.
