What You Need To Know

To stay relevant, brands must continue to engage their customers through ads, contests, and other marketing strategies.

But what is a Facebook competition? How does it work? And why should I care?

Competitions are a great way to get noticed and build brand awareness. They are excellent for getting more likes on your page and in your group or boosting traffic to your site. They also provide a fun opportunity to interact with your audience.

Competitions on Facebook can involve posting a question or challenge, then promoting it to engage your followers.

Rewards can include cash prizes, gifts, or even admission to exclusive events.

But before jumping into a competition, there are some things you should consider. To ensure your competition is a success, check out these helpful tips.

1. What Are Facebook’s Official Rules?

Like most aspects of Facebook, there are official rules, including rules for all competitions.

However, the rules tend to change as new policies arise, so it’s important to check them before starting a competition. The current ones include:

Setting Up Your Own Restrictions

When you create a competition, the owner of the Facebook Page or Group’s job is to ensure they run properly and lawfully.

This means you have to set up terms and eligibility requirements which would include the age range for who can participate and the region for the competition.

So, for example, a brand can set guidelines that only people 18 plus in the U.S. can participate in the competition.

It also means that there need to be clear standards of how the competition will be run. Such as how and when the participants will participate and receive rewards.

Transparency is paramount. It will ensure everyone knows how the competition will operate and won’t get your brand in any sticky situations with Facebook or the law.

Create A Statement About Facebook

You will also need to mention in a post or release that Facebook is not involved in the competition in any way. And that the brand itself is in charge and responsible for the competition.

The participants also need to agree to these terms. So, it’s your job to get the participants to consent to these terms before participating.

Restrictions To Where You Can Post About The Campaign

Only official Facebook Pages, Groups, or Events can be used as platforms to promote a competition.

A brand can’t encourage its team or other participants to promote, tag, or share the competition on their personal Timelines.

People can find this as a spammy way to promote a competition anyway, so this shouldn’t impact promoting your competition.

Understanding Who’s Involved

Unfortunately, you are on your own and in charge of running a campaign on Facebook. So, Facebook can’t get involved if issues arise; it’s your job to manage any potential problems.

2. What Objectives Do You Want To Achieve?

Now that you know the rules, it’s time to set your goals for the competition.

There are numerous objectives you can select for a Facebook competition.

Some of them include:

• Increasing likes or followers.
• Getting traffic from other pages.
• Building engagement
• Promoting a product or service.

If you want to increase the number of likes you receive for posts and use a competition to help with this, then you need to post regularly and interact with users.

To build engagement, you should ask questions to your participants and answer any responses they give.

Additionally, if you want to promote a product or service, you should use promotion tools like Facebook ads.

Generally, the main objectives of any Facebook competition are to increase engagement and gain followers.

If you want to achieve higher engagement rates, you need to create a competition where participants feel like they have something to gain.

This could mean giving away prizes to select participants after encouraging them to participate on your social media pages or directing them back to your website to sign up for your email subscription.

This helps you get more active leads while also generating engagement.

Tracking Your Competition

As you would set goals for other social media campaigns, selecting specific and measurable objectives is paramount. This way, you can track the success of the campaign.

Putting together a couple of key performance indicators (KPIs) can help inform your promotional strategy for your Facebook competition.

It’s also incredibly important to set a schedule to monitor Facebook promotion analytics regularly.

Promote Your Competition

For your competition to gain traction, you need to leverage your marketing efforts.

Whether your competition is run solely on Facebook or you’re using it across multiple platforms, it’s crucial to hit all areas where your customers follow you.

Either direct them back to Facebook to participate or be clear about how and where they can enter the competition on other platforms, such as your website.

Also, depending on your brand goals for the competition, it may be worth boosting it as a paid Facebook post.

You can also customize your campaign by creating unique hashtags. This will help participants associate a post with your competition to remind them to enter if they haven’t done so already or reignite their excitement about potential prizes.

In addition, remember to establish a set schedule for when and how you will post about your competition throughout its duration.

Do You Need An App For Your Competition?

Using a third-party app to run your competition removes a lot of the headache associated with running a promotion but also has some drawbacks.

For example, they may not offer any additional functionality beyond what your team can manage.

Also, if you plan on promoting through Facebook ads, you’ll need to pay separately for each campaign (which could get expensive).

And finally, these apps aren’t usually designed to work on mobile devices, so you won’t be able to access them easily from a smartphone or tablet.

3. Who Is The Audience You Want To Enter?

With your objectives and rules established, it’s time to decide who you want to get involved in your competition. It’s essential to tailor your competition to your target audience.

What do you think your target audience wants? Do you have a new product or product line coming out soon? Then maybe you can gift a couple of participants some of these products.

Or perhaps there is a product that is generally sold out. Then a couple of lucky winners can receive this elusive good.

You could also create a limited edition product specifically for the competition. This way, more people will get excited to participate, so they don’t miss out on this one-time offer.

Figuring out what your audience wants most can help improve the success of your competition. Choose a prize that appeals to your ideal customers. You want your participants to be excited when they finally get their gift.

Finally, think carefully about how you’re reaching your target audience.

Will they respond positively to how you plan to promote your competition? Are you offering enough prizes for the type of following you have on Facebook or across social media?

4. What Type Of Competition Do You Choose?

A Facebook competition requires a lot of planning. Before starting any Facebook competition, you need to decide how much effort and money you want to put into the competition.

Such as how much money you want to spend on Facebook ads and other promotional activities, as well as what prizes you want to give away and how many prizes you’re willing to offer. Then it’ll be easier to select what type of competition would work best.

Three traditional competitions include giveaways, sweepstakes, and contests. Each has different rules.

If you plan to run a giveaway, you should consider limiting how many products you give away. Usually, with a giveaway, a set number of the people who participate first receive a prize.

A sweepstake is more of a lottery where you would select a certain number of participants from the pull of participants that enter the competition over a period of time.

And a contest would have more specific criteria that the participants need to follow, and then the participant(s) who best follow the criteria would win. Such as a picture contest.

How Long Will The Competition Run?

If you want to run a competition on Facebook, then you should know how long the competition will last. The typical duration is one month.

However, some competitions may be open longer if you have the budget and time or certain long-term goals for that competition.

Some competitions end when they reach a certain number of entries, while others continue until a specific date.

5. How Will You Follow Up With Participants?

It’s crucial to communicate how you will follow up with your participants to let them know who won the competition.

This way, you won’t create any unnecessary upsetness or miscommunicate about when the prizes will go out. You don’t want to waste all your hard work by ending the competition on a sour note.

Here are some tips on how you can follow up with participants after the competition ends:

1. Announce the end of the competition and thank everyone for participating.
2. Make a note of the winners’ names and send them a message with the information about how and when they will receive the prize.
3. Finally, don’t forget to check periodically to see what new messages or comments they leave.

Takeaways

Facebook competitions are a fun way to promote your company, brand, product, service, or cause.

Also, they are a great way to build a community around your brand and get feedback from followers.

They’re free to enter, easy to set up, and fun to watch. So, if you want to build a community around your product or service, try creating a Facebook competition.

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Featured Image: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock