Online contests on social media, especially on Facebook, are all the rage these days. These contests are extremely popular with people of all ages and therefore are wonderful opportunities for promoting your company or your brand at a very negligible cost. Thanks to way online contests using voting systems to encourage people to share them repeatedly, they are an untapped potential for quickly popularizing your brand or your company within either a very targeted and select audience or a wide and more general one.
Why use Facebook Contests?
The biggest advantage with Facebook contests is that you can make the platform as selective or as generalized as possible. If you are marketing something, which enjoys a very niche audience, you can enjoy extremely targeted promotion with the contest system. However, if you are promoting something with broad use scenarios, you can use the contest to get your message spread far and wide, thanks to people with diverse and large friend lists. The possibilities are simply endless with online contests on Facebook.
How to get started?
Online contests work because participants think they each have a shot at winning some grand prize. Here is where a little bit of economics gets into play; you need to decide whether paid marketing outweighs the cost of a prize that will be attractive enough to convince people to participate in the contest. A prize must be valuable enough to warrant people’s attention and desirable enough that they will ask their friends and followers to vote on their entry. However, too expensive a prize cannot be justified as well; you can manage better forms of marketing inside that budget. Due diligence is essential in this segment if you have to utilize the online contest on Facebook to its maximum extent.
Use voting to determine winner
Next, put a voting system in place. The contest must not be one that has a panel of judges or where selection is based on any objective form of merit or any fixed metric. There must be a social aspect to the contest that will require participants to share the contest within their respective friends groups. It is this aspect of the Facebook contest that makes it such a powerful tool for marketing. Without the voting system in place, your contest cannot gather the traction and social media promotion you desire, which is the whole point of the contest itself.
Do due diligence
Lastly, put the deadline in place after conducting some research. Too short a deadline and people will be disheartened and discouraged from participating. Too long a deadline and you run the risk of the contest running out of steam; attention from social media users is extremely fickle and must not be allowed to spread thin. Therefore, there must remain a sense of urgency, a fear of missing out, that will urge participants to share the contest with some rush.
And voila, you have all the things you need to successfully hold an online Facebook contest that can be used to promote your brand and bring you promotion you need in a very cost effective manner.