Let me start off by saying that I’m a huge sucker for Facebook giveaways and contests. You want me to tag a friend to win a gift card? I’m in. Share a post for a chance to get a discount on my next purchase? It’s done.
Facebook giveaways not only give you a great way to find new followers and customers, keep your existing ones engaged, and improve your organic reach, but they can help you turn your social media audience into brand ambassadors.
But, how do you run a contest on Facebook? In this post, we’ll explore,
Why run a Facebook giveaway or contest?
There are many reasons you might consider doing a Facebook giveaway or contest, and you can orient your contest around different marketing goals and objectives.
Some common reasons businesses run Facebook giveaways are to:
(We’ll get into more specific Facebook contest goals below.)
Although other social media sites like Instagram support contests, Facebook giveaways are a good bet because Facebook is the most popular social media platform out there.
Data source
If this is your first time doing a social media giveaway or you’re trying to reach the most people, Facebook is your best option. But that doesn’t mean Instagram giveaways aren’t effective–they’re super effective, and there are opportunities to run your giveaways and contests on both channels.
How to do a giveaway or contest on Facebook
Once you decide to run a contest on Facebook, there are some simple steps you can follow to make sure it’s a huge success.
Like any marketing activity that you’re going to sink some time (and resources) into, your Facebook contest should have a goal. Decide what social media goal you want to accomplish with the contest.
Examples of goals driven by Facebook contests include:
Grow your email list
Make the goal of your Facebook contest to get people to sign up for your business’s email marketing blast or newsletter. Structure your giveaway so that people must provide an email address to enter. Email address collection is at the core of just about any lead generation strategy.
Get new customers
Find and capture new customers with a Facebook contest by offering a new customer discount or promotion to new customers who enter the contest. You can also have your existing customers tag their friends and family (AKA new customers) as part of their entry to attract a new crop of customers.
Get more followers
You can require entrants to like your business page or even your Instagram profile to get more followers on those profiles.
Host a class or event
A Facebook contest is an effective way to increase awareness for a class or event you’re hosting. And it’s an easy way to determine a prize – the winner can receive free event admission. This type of Facebook contest helps you fill your event with attendees by spreading the word about it. Follow up after the contest with a special discount code or the event details to those who entered but didn’t win.
Promote a sale or promotion
Use a Facebook contest to get the word out about a sale or promotion that you’re offering for your business. The prize for the contest can be a giveaway of the product or service that’s on sale.
✅ Facebook contest tip: It’s okay to want to get more followers and likes. However, make sure that these follows and likes are coming from the right people.
Your ultimate Facebook giveaway goal is to grow your business through new clients, customers, and sales. If you’re getting 1,000 new page likes from people who probably won’t become customers, your Facebook contest isn’t going to help your business.
A great contest prize is what entices all the potential customers. Use the tips below to come up with a prize that will ensure a successful Facebook contest.
Invest in the prize
Although you may initially be hesitant to invest in contest prizes, it’s important to think about the return on investment you’ll generate from your Facebook giveaway. In order to run a successful Facebook contest, you need a good prize. Offer something that will entice users to take your desired action.
Offer a relevant prize
The prize should also be something relevant to your business. For example, many businesses will give away something like a free iPad.
Although most people would love to have a free iPad, this prize attracts too many people, many of whom may have no interest in your business whatsoever. Your prize should be relevant to your target audience.
Select the prize from your existing offerings
Offering a prize relevant to your business ensures that you’ll attract the right people for your contest goal. You only want to target people that are interested in your product or service. By picking a prize relevant to your business, like a free personal training session, free cake at your bakery, or a free gift basket of spa products, your contest will attract people who are interested in your business. You may even consider giving away your product or service for free!
Step 3: Identify your Facebook giveaway entry methodThere are a number of different instructions or requirements you can lay out for your participants to enter the contest. Here are some examples of entry requirements.
You might require one or more of the following:
✅ Facebook contest tip: You want to find a good balance here so that participants are required to invest a little bit of time signing up but not so much that they’re going to become discouraged or frustrated. Also, make sure to be as explicit as possible in your directions so there’s no room for confusion
Step 4: Make sure you can contact the giveaway winnerWhile you’ll be able to contact Facebook contest entrants through their Facebook profiles, you might also want to require email addresses with your entries. This will allow you to contact the winner more formally and will also add all of the participants to your email list! Now you have a channel to keep in touch with people who are interested in your products or services.
Now’s the fun part: letting people know about your contest!
Design the post
Use free visual marketing tools like Canva to design an appealing and attractive post. You may want to include certain details in the image of the post as well as within the post caption.
Pin the post
The next step in the contest is to set up the post for the Facebook contest. Facebook makes it easy to create a post and “pin” it to the top of your business’s Facebook page. (Use these steps to pin your post.)
Double-check contest rules
When setting up a contest, follow the Facebook Contest Rules to make sure that your promotion doesn’t violate any of Facebook’s rules, such as “Acknowledgement that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook.”
Include the right contest information
Make sure that your contest post includes ALL of the information, including:
✅ Facebook contest tip: Facebook posts for giveaways and contests will generally be longer than typical posts since there’s a lot of information to cover.
Try to be as succinct as possible, and make sure the directions are super clear (you may even ask a few employees or friends to read over your post to make sure it makes sense).
Facebook giveways have the potential to reach a plethora of new customers. And since Facebook is the most popular social media site out there, don’t let this opportunity go to waste!
Here are some ways to promote your Facebook contest:
Facebook contests are exciting, but you can’t forget about the contest itself and that you have to pick a winner. Depending on the type of contest, you’re either going to choose a random winner or the person who best met the requirements for the contest (e.g. best photo, most referrals, etc.).
Random winner selection
For the majority of Facebook contests, it’s a good idea to pick a random winner because it’s the most impartial way.
Instead of blindly choosing a name, you can use a tool like the Random Name Picker.
Best candidate selection
If you had certain stipulations to your contest such as submitting a photo, make sure to explain why you chose the winner so that nobody cries foul.
Step 8: Announce the Facebook contest winnerAfter selecting your winner, make sure to announce it on your business’s Facebook page and elsewhere so that people can see the contest has clearly ended. Create a post with the winner’s name on it and tag them on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to make sure they know they won.
If you collected their contact information like an email address, send them an email.
What to do after your Facebook giveaway ends
Your Facebook contest has ended–now what? Don’t lose out on the momentum you built from running your Facebook giveaway. Use these three tips to keep your Facebook contest strategy moving.
Make sure to craft a post sincerely thanking everyone for participating and inviting them to check out your business’s product or service, as that was the goal from the get-go. If you have future Facebook giveaways coming up, you can also tease those so they have more reasons to come back to your Facebook business page in the future.
2. Do some follow up workThere are a few different ways you can follow up after your Facebook giveaway ends. If you collected email addresses, follow up via email and thank them for participating. You can even send them a discount code so they become a customer.
Another way to follow up after your Facebook contest is to write a blog post on your site about the recent contest. If your contest prize was a new product or service, writing a blog post about the contest and the winner is a good way to get more information about it on your website.
Follow up with the winner and include quotes or pictures of the winner and their prize on social media.
Make sure to tag that person on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram to increase engagement!
After the contest or giveaway, take a look at your success. Did the contest work to achieve the goals that you set? If you found that the participation surpassed your expectations and it generated a lot of excitement, then there’s no reason you can’t hold more contests. In fact, you may be so pleased with the results of your Facebook contest that you’ll plan another one in the near future.
Run your own Facebook giveaway
Running regular Facebook contests is a great idea, and the return on investment can be quite high for little effort. There’s no reason that your business can’t create one today–just follow these simple steps and get to giving away!
More American adults use Facebook than any other social media platform.
But the bigger Facebook gets—almost 2.3 billion monthly active users, as of 2019—the more brands struggle to earn attention.
As engagement drops and the number of posts rise, marketers need relevant, interactive content that rises above the noise. Like, for example, a Facebook contest.
Running a contest is an inexpensive—and sometimes even easy—way to achieve measurable results for your Facebook marketing goals. We’ve gathered a few great Facebook contest examples to inspire you.
That said, there are also a lot of ways—from obnoxious to outright illegal—that Facebook contests should not be run.
Here we lay out how to plan and execute a contest that’ll thrill your audience and your analytics both.
Bonus: Download a free guide that teaches you how to turn Facebook traffic into sales in four simple steps using Hootsuite.
Facebook’s contest rules change regularly, so it pays to stay up-to-date.
For instance, Facebook used to require that contests be run on third party apps, but now you can run contests directly on the platform.
Using, say, a regular post from your business Page. (Haven’t set up your business Page yet? Now’s the time.)
As well, Facebook no longer allows certain popular types of contests. (By “popular” we mean “overused and spammy”—more details on those in a moment.)
Facebook’s most recent updated contest rules break down into three major parts.
In other words, Facebook isn’t going to help you avoid breaking state, provincial or federal laws by, say, accidentally running a lottery instead of a contest.
Hint: a lottery includes any contest where participants are required to spend money to play, i.e., buy a product.
One tried-and-true place to house all these regulations, notifications, and consents is a landing page. Landing pages have other benefits, too, which we’ll get into later.
Here’s where the old rules fall by the wayside. Asking people to tag a friend or share a post on their timeline used to be a standard contest requirement. No more!
Here’s the direct word from Facebook itself:
“Promotions may be administered on Pages, Groups, Events, or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries”, and “tag your friends in this post to enter” are not permitted).” (Source: Facebook)
That said, the benefits of these latest changes outweigh the inconveniences.
Those practices were actually pretty annoying to most people. Decreasing the overall pollution on Facebook means a better experience for users, which means people will continue to use the platform (and enter your contests).
So, to recap what’s allowed versus what‘s not:
Ok:
Not ok:
One grey area is asking people to like your Page. Technically, this isn’t against the rules, but it’s not recommended because there’s no easy way to track the folks who have done so.
That said, you can encourage people to like your Page and enter via a less suspect method.
So, if our goal is to cut the crap and give the people what they want so that they love us, what do good contests actually look like?
It depends on your business goals. Do you want to increase engagement with likes and shares? Or awareness with impressions? Or maybe you want to drive traffic to your website?
Certain types of contests can pull double-duty.
That is, they can focus on one of the above goals, and also collect user-generated content for your social media calendar, or crowdsource opinions, or gather high-quality leads for your sales team.
Consider the following species of contest, and choose one that supports your objectives.
Arguably the simplest contest to run is a giveaway.
People are wowed by a desirable prize, and so they perform an action of your choice. The action can be as simple as liking the post or as complicated as producing a video.
Absolut gave away an all-expenses paid Coachella weekend to fans in the UK. This probably felt like a perfect prize, at least until the calls to boycott the festival started.
Still, this UK contest was so successful that Absolut ran an identical giveaway for American residents a month later.
Meanwhile, to reach a slightly more specific demographic, this hunting store gave away a bunch—like really an unusually large number—of plastic geese.
Unfortunately, as you can see below, they broke Facebook’s timeline rule by asking people to share the contest post. Think of it like this: if your goose fullbodies are alluring enough, people will want to share the news on their own without you asking.
Add a twist to your giveaway by stretching it into a multi-day event. Not only will it make winning seem more likely, returning to your Page several times will increase audience retention, so that people will remember all those positive new opinions about your brand.
To celebrate Chipmas, Kettle Brand did giveaways every day for four days. They asked people to comment naming their favourite flavour, and each day a winner was randomly chosen to receive either a case of their favourite flavour, or, on the fourth day, a year’s supply.
Note that while Kettle Brand asks participants to @ a friend (Facebook specifically prohibits this!) they get away with it because it’s written in verse it’s a suggestion, not a requirement.
According to Maxwell PR, the campaign’s creators, the giveaway earned Kettle Brand 340,000 impressions (that’s around 18.9 percent reach, when the average organic reach for a Facebook post is 6.4 percent) and an impressive average engagement rate of 5.1 percent.
Likewise, Rex Specs did a similar holiday countdown. (I have nothing to add here, except that these dogs are very handsome boys.)
You know what people love in this day and age? Feeling smart.
Trivia, skill-testing questions, puzzles, quizzes. Anything that will make a complicated world feel coherent for one satisfying second.
By combining a prize with that feeling of accomplishment, your contest becomes deeply clickable. (And in some cases maybe you can even skip the prize.)
For instance, National Geographic asked a pretty tough question to feed excitement for the second season of its show Genius. Fans had to pay attention over five days to figure out the clues, which required knowledge of architecture, art history and European history.
In return, Nat Geo offered an appropriately lavish—but nerdily specific—reward: a heavily-scheduled week in Spain (guided tour of the Alhambra and private flamenco lessons, anyone?).
Photo contests are popular for good reason. Not only do they boost activity on your Page, with the right agreements in place, you get to tap into a source of user-generated content for your marketing calendar.
Johnson’s Myanmar received a ton of baby pictures—most of which came already came branded in the company’s custom Facebook Frame—in return for some customized tins.
Bonus: Download a free guide that teaches you how to turn Facebook traffic into sales in four simple steps using Hootsuite.
Get the free guide right now!
Meanwhile, Kellogg’s ran a contest in 2014 where they asked for customers’ creative Eggo recipes, taking this “versatile canvas” of foods beyond breakfast. We’re classifying this as a photo contest because what other use would the company have for the submitted recipes? (Did they make a cookbook? No, they did not.
)
While Kellogg’s certainly got the social activity—and probably the sales, given the size of the cash prize—they were looking for, if we were in charge of this contest today we’d want to solicit photos that could be used in our social feeds down the line. Because what they got wasn’t always, um, pretty.
On the opposite end of the scale, Skies Magazine doesn’t even offer a prize beyond public recognition.
The Canadian publisher knows it can rely on the passion of amateur aviation photographers to provide a steady stream of quality images. Skies holds weekly contests on their Facebook page, and fans vote on their favorite photo. The winner is featured in their free daily e-newsletter.
For more ideas, check out these examples of social media contests that resulted in great user-generated content.
This is a missed opportunity:
But what should my comment say, Demi?
If you’ve already convinced people to make the effort to write a word or two, why not ask them to make those words meaningful? Gather insight on your business goals by asking for feedback on a new product name or ideas for improvement.
Feed two birds with one scone!
Even if you don’t have any burning questions for your customers (come on, yes you do) asking your audience to think creatively is more fun for them. They want to write a funny caption for that photo, fill in the blanks, or tell you their deepest desire vis-à-vis their scheduling software needs.
And if you can find a way to include a picture of a baby animal, we highly encourage that.
This is a subspecies of contest which gives the power to the people, rather than relying on random.org to choose the winner. It’s especially useful if the contest is at all creative: people can vote for their favourite submission by Liking the relevant comment, photo, or post.
The advantage here is that it encourages sharing without explicitly requiring it. For instance: if I want that duckling to be named Cage Pooper, I am going to have to tell all my friends to look at that post and vote for my comment that says the duckling should be named Cage Pooper.
By now you probably have an idea or two as to what you can offer your audience, and what you can ask for in return, when it comes to your Facebook contest. Here are some best practices to keep in mind as you iron out the details.
If you’re going to devote several days—or weeks!—to planning, promoting, administrating and customer-caring this contest, it should directly support the objectives of your Facebook marketing strategy.
Here are some examples of objectives and goals to choose from before you get started:
Once you’ve narrowed down your specific goals, it’s a lot easier to figure out what kind of contest you’re going to run, and how you’re going to run it.
And because Facebook contests are very quantifiable, you’ll be able to prove your ROI after, too.
You want your contest to attract people who will like your brand, not people who like large cash prizes (a.k.a. everyone).
This is also known as the Don’t Give Away iPads Rule.
Choose a prize that would appeal to your perfect customer.
Your very own flagship product or service is often a great choice: contest participants will self-identify as people who are interested in what you have to offer. Yes, they might prefer your product when it’s free, but once they’ve imagined winning it they’ll have a better appreciation of its value.
At the same time, the prize has to be intrinsically valuable enough that people will pause their eternal scroll and take the time to enter your contest.
If you want to expand your contest’s reach by offering a more exciting prize, don’t select one randomly. Look at why people care about your brand.
What values are they identifying with? What lifestyle are they aspiring to?
This matters especially if you’re asking people to provide user-generated content: when we’re talking about their brand, things get personal. Ask yourself whether participating in your contest fits with who your audience is and how they’re already behaving on Facebook.
One final note on knowing your audience: consider geo-targeting your posts so that you don’t annoy fans who live in ineligible places.
The vast majority of Facebook users are on mobile, so design your contest experience for a variety of devices and operating systems. (I like to send test links to my mom, proud owner of the world’s only living Blackberry Playbook.)
If your contest requires a landing page, keep it as low-effort as possible. Form fatigue is real. Greedy forms asking for zip codes, salary ranges, and your boss’ phone number will lead to user drop-off, or blatant lying.
If you are looking to filter out low-quality leads or content, a high barrier to entry (i.
e., anything that involves more than two clicks) will scare off the half-hearted and noncommittal.
If your goal is to gather truly amazing user-generated content, then yes, you can make the prize exceptional. Asking people to write a story, (or, more practically, a review), take a photo, or make a video makes sense if you are breaking the Don’t Give Away iPads Rule by, um, giving away iPads.
Alternately, if your goal is to gather great leads, make the task exceptionally relevant to your target demographic.
Finally, in order to help your contest gain the traction it needs to reach critical mass, leverage your other marketing channels. Whether your contest is for Facebook alone, or is running simultaneously on your other social profiles, make sure to post about it, mention it in your newsletter, push it on your proprietary app, etc.
As well, depending on your business objectives for the contest, it might be worthwhile to boost your contest as a paid Facebook post.
For instance, if you pay for Lead Ads, you can gather audience information without constructing a landing page. (That said, you will also pay for each lead.)
Manage your Facebook presence by using Hootsuite to schedule posts, share videos, engage with followers, manage ads, and measure the impact of your efforts. Try it free today.
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Updated
Facebook changes its rules regularly, so you should check the latest data before organizing a contest. For Russia, the rules are published here.
Do not run a contest on Facebook. Spend it on Vkontakte or Instagram. Unless you have a high-quality, large group with active members, a Facebook contest will perform much worse than other sites.
Or run a contest on your website and use Facebook to promote.
But if your manager wants Facebook, or the sales department has already told the client how cool it would be, read on.
Facebook refers to contests as "Promotions" in its policies.
This means activation, where:
• Confirmation of membership or registration required.
• An element of chance.
• Prize.
Facebook, not surprisingly, bans:
* Create fraudulent or deceptive groups, pages and events.
Rules for designing business pages
Facebook contest rules
Contests can be run on Facebook business pages, groups, events, and apps.
It is better to place the rules on the page on a separate landing page. They will be detailed and legally correct. Write:
And that's just about the legality of the contest on Facebook. In order for the promotion to be successful, we also need interesting and understandable mechanics, as well as promotion.
Do not forget before the start of the competition and the creation of an alert publication about the analysis of your audience and the audience of competitors. The Popsters service can help you with this. With it, you will learn more about the preferences of the target audience, based on advanced statistics of Facebook groups.
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Pranks for the audience - an excellent way to attract attention to the public, increase the number of subscribers.
Let's talk about how to properly conduct a drawing on Facebook, form a list of candidates and organize the procedure as honestly as possible, without a hitch.
Content:
Mandatory addition of the following information:
An example of a contest
Usually, users are invited to participate in various drawings:
These are the most common conditions, but the organizers may indicate their own, based on the situation.
Most often, the winner is determined live using a random number generator.
The organizers of some communities hold not just a draw among users, but a competition for the best content, where the best are determined:
Example of a creative contest
If the content collected during the contest is intended to be used in whole or in part, the organizers must notify the participants in advance.
And here is the idea of the contest, the holding of which does not require any special efforts by the organizers. But at the same time, such a contest very well stimulates the activity of users on a page or in a group.
The essence of the contest : at the end of each week, users receive gifts (at least purely symbolic) who have received the top fan status on the page, and the status of the top co-author in the group.
Facebook rules categorize sweepstakes and contests as "Promotions".
Promotions are subject to the following requirements:
However, despite the fact that reposts in the personal chronicle are prohibited, this practice is used all the time. So far, no one has been punished for it.
But, going to break the rules, you still need to remember about the possible consequences.
The organizers of the competition should carefully consider what will be awarded to the winner. The prize of a raffle or competition must certainly correspond to the theme of the community that organized the event or the interests of its participants. If the prize is voluminous or weighty, then you need to either limit the geography of the competition, or think about the way the gift is delivered.
Territorial restrictions for participants are appropriate if the organizer wants to present the prize in a special place. For example, in your store.
Example of possible prizes
It is very important to create a successful competition or giveaway announcement. Experts advise choosing an option such as a banner.
How to issue it:
If such a banner is supposed to be used when placing paid advertising, its dimensions must be maintained in the parameters 1200x628, and the text should account for no more than 20% of the area.
All other information about the draw or competition must be placed in the text attached to the banner of the publication.
In order for as many people as possible to learn about the upcoming draw or competition, promotional tools are used, their set is not small. Specific means are selected based on the goals, scope and budget of the planned activity.
Competent promotion of the competition at the same time will help increase the number of page subscribers, group members, and increase brand awareness.
Commonly used means are:
From the very beginning of the promotion, it is necessary to regularly publish intermediate information: the number of participants, the number of free places (if there are restrictions), the number of days until the end of registration.
Increases credibility and encourages people to participate by posting information with tips on how to register and win.
To announce a draw or contest on the page, you can use the "Event" option. Or add a link to the promotion site, if one exists.
The culmination of the drawing or competition is the final summing up and determining the winner.
A lot depends on the type of event.
These services are used for large-scale contests and sweepstakes. With the help of such services, a selection is made and the winner is honestly determined.
The resource generates a link that the organizers place in the final publication as confirmation of the fairness of the draw.
During the draw, it is necessary to constantly monitor statistics using Facebook tools: daily check traffic, the number of subscribers, analyze user activity. This is the only way to determine the effectiveness of a marketing campaign.
If paid advertising was launched, then ADS Manager has a detailed report on clicks and transitions.
After the end of the draw or competition, you should definitely make a separate post with congratulations to the winners, with their photo at the moment of awarding the prizes.
