How to organise a Facebook contest: a step-by-step guide

Contests are a popular and effective way for businesses to build awareness and grow communities on social networks. Using Facebook, the most widely used social network in the world, businesses can run competitions to reach a much wider audience than would otherwise be possible.

As Facebook is such a key platform in the social media marketing game, and as online contests and competitions are such an effective and versatile tool in the modern marketer’s playbook, it’s important to understand the basic principles of creating and running a successful contest on your Facebook page. In this article we will guide you step by step through the different stages.

Running a Facebook contest: rules and best practices

Facebook is a great way for your business to build its audience and community, and to promote its products and services. When running online contests or giveaways through Facebook, or more likely, using Facebook to promote your online contests and giveaways, you need to adapt how you promote it to the proprietary language and mechanics of Facebook.

It is important to respect certain rules and good practices to ensure the quality and legitimacy of the game, but also to avoid potential legal problems. By following these rules, you can encourage people to participate in your contest, get them to engage with your targeted messaging, and strengthen and grow your community.

A step-by-step guide to running a successful Facebook contest

In order to run a successful contest on Facebook and reach as many people as possible, we’ve outlined the essential steps to take:

1. Plan your strategy in advance and define the objective of the contest

Before launching your online contest on Facebook, it is essential to clearly define the objective of your marketing and communications campaign. Is it to generate new followers, increase engagement within your existing community, collect customer information, or promote a new product or service? By clarifying the objective of your campaign, and figuring out where your online contest fits into that broader operation, it will be easier to set up game mechanics that are best adapted to it.

Then, by carefully planning your competition strategy, you can ensure the long-term success of your marketing campaign. By scheduling contests on Facebook every month, for example, it is possible to maintain the interest of your audience through regular interactions, and to encourage new users to get involved. By planning the dates in advance, it is possible to maximise visibility, participation and most importantly, the number of entries.

Another advantage of planning your Facebook competitions in advance is that you can test different game concepts, see what works, improve your approach, and reach a wider audience. It is important to diversify the types of online contests you’re delivering, the content and the prizes in order to keep users interested. Drimify – the games creation platform that makes contest creation easy, provides a variety of tools to make it simple and fast for you to make and run your competitions.

Pro tip: By capitalising on the highlights of the year such as Valentine’s Day, the holidays, back-to-school, Halloween, Black Friday, and Christmas with the Advent Calendar, it is possible to increase user engagement and maximise participation throughout the year.

2. Select the right game mechanics

It is important to select the right mechanics for a contest on Facebook according to your objectives and the products you want to promote. There are several types of contests that you can easily share and promote across social media networks, such as Quizzes, instant win games, casual mini games, sports games, and gamified experiences that have multiple levels, and can include multiple chances for players to win.

Each of these types of contest can be tailored to a particular audience and a specific objective. For example, classic mini games like Pacman or Connect 4 can be a good choice for a company that wants to encourage participants to become familiar with a new product or service in an original and spontaneous way. Sports Games can be a good choice for a company that wants to encourage participants to share a post with their prediction about an important match or fixture, or brands who are partnered with a team or sponsoring a sporting event.

Photo and Video Contests are also popular on social networks such as Facebook, as the visual nature of photos and videos help the competitions gain visibility, encouraging subscribers and participants to comment on the posts. Customising the Photo Contest game engine on the Drimify platform allows you to moderate entries, extract user-generated content that reflects your brand, values, and quality standards, and easily approve a shortlist to put out in a Voting Gallery, and once again encourage people within your target audience to engage with you as a brand when they vote for the winners.

By using a platform such as Drimify, with a varied and complete game catalogue and support services, companies can easily adapt the mechanics of their contest to their target audience and objectives. It is important to understand the basic principle of each type of game to choose the most appropriate one for your needs. The game mechanics need to support the objectives of your marketing campaign, and also the expectations of the community.

3. Determine the rules of your competition

When organising a Facebook contest, it is also important to consider the rules of entry. The rules of the competition must be clear, transparent, and easy to understand for the participants with detailed instructions.

It is essential to specify the conditions of participation, the criteria for selecting the winner, the duration of the competition (start date and end date), the prizes, and the way in which the prizes are awarded. The rules should also comply with Facebook’s terms and conditions.

4. Choose the most appropriate prizes

To ensure the success of your competitions, it is obviously important to carefully define the prize or gifts that will be awarded to the winner. The prize must therefore be in line with the objectives of the competition and with the target audience if it’s to arouse their interest and motivate them to enter.

For example, if it was an online contest for an eCommerce retailer, it would make sense to run a competition where the winner would receive a top of the line product that’s newly released, but every participant would also at least receive a promotional code. The promotional code given to all participants has the potential to massively increase sales, as if enough people have entered, that’s a lot of people who have not only been subject to targeted messaging, and presumably had their enthusiasm for the retailer and the products boosted, but also now have an exclusive opportunity to buy the promoted product, or products, at a better, limited time price.

It’s also very important to note that you should be very clear about how the prizes will be awarded to the winners, including whether this will be done by random draw, based on merit, or by some other means.

5. Create a post to announce the competition

Except, don’t create one post, create multiple posts to promote your new contest. Make it a pinned post, make it a paid Facebook ad, and put it in your Facebook stories, and even create a Facebook Reel. Include all the important information (rules, date, duration, prize to be won, etc.) in a readable way. It is very important to take care of the visual of this first post, because the graphic design has a great impact on the conversion of your audience.

Additionally, to maximise the reach of the competition, it is essential to promote it to your existing community, and encourage participants and users to share the competition with their friends. Most social media networks will have terms of service that prohibit or regulate making users share content on their own timelines or walls as a method of entry, so either check if this is the case, or just encourage people to do so Additional promotional channels that should be made use of can include the company’s Facebook page, email newsletters, as well as other social networks.

Because you’re limiting your contest’s ability to reach the largest possible audience by only running it to Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn, creating contests on Drimify that can easily be shared across the social networking platforms, but all managed from a single dashboard, allows you to get the best possible results.

6. Announce the winners of the competition

Communicating with your audience after the contest has concluded to announce the winners is as important as promoting the launch of the contest in the first place. Once the competition is over, announce the winners in a clear and transparent way. If the winner is chosen by drawing lots, make sure you keep proof – while it’s unlikely and a real rarity, you may need it in case of a dispute.

To announce the winners, you can do so via a post on your Facebook page, as well as in a private message to the winners. Then, you will have to give the prizes to the winners as soon as possible, in accordance with the terms and conditions you set out in the competition rules.

7. Analyse the results

Through the data you collect in your Drimify dashboard, you can better understand and know your audience, their behaviour, and their preferences. For the best results, you should look to run online contests long-term, and you can use this data with a view to improve your contest campaigns over time.

It is important to analyse the results of the campaign and to evaluate them using key performance indicators (KPIs) in order to learn from them for future campaigns. Data to be analysed can include the number of participations, the engagement rate, the number of shares, and so on and so forth. This helps you as a business and as a contest creator understand where it performed well, and where it could have been improved.

Similarly, you can use Facebook Analytics to further inform your ROI calculations regarding your contest, as well as to evaluate how effectively you promoted it on the social media platform.

Increase the impact of Facebook contests through gamification

Make sure your Facebook contests are successful in increasing your online reach, and capturing the attention of your followers by following the steps listed in this article. Well run online contests allow you to create a sense of competition and generate excitement among your target audience, which can result in increased sales and a larger audience for your future campaigns.

By using social networks like Facebook you can extend the reach of contests by offering your social media communities, and their connections, and other users you can reach through the algorithm and through paid ads, the opportunity to engage with your brand in a fun way. This can help increase your social media following, as well as drive traffic to your website, and drive sales.

To maximise the effect, don’t just limit your online contests to Facebook. While some demographics will use certain social media platforms in ways that constitute trends, to limit your contests to a by-the-numbers approach when platforms like Drimify allow you manage the contest from one place, while easily integrating it across all the social networks, you can have the best of all worlds, and reach your goals faster.

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