Competitions are extremely common on Facebook nowadays, largely due the astonishing amount of people that use the site every day.
It’s an effective way to increase your brand awareness and drive new traffic to your page. You’ll find it a worthwhile endeavour if you create an interesting competition with a prize that attracts people.
You should be wary of Facebook’s policies surrounding competitions before you begin though.
If you go against any of Facebook’s rules, then your competition can be removed from the platform and your page may get permanently suspended. This will leave you with the uphill task of building your dedicated following back to where it was.
We’ve put together a short list of things you should know before posting your competition…
#1 What competitions normally include…
- Entry/registration
- Giveaway/prize
- Element of chance
These are the sections typically found in a Facebook competition. There’s a sign-up process (1), an incentive to get involved (2) and a random winner from all of the entrants (3).
#2 You need to make it clear that Facebook has nothing to do with the promotion
You should include, somewhere in the copy of the post, that you are running this competition completely independent of Facebook and that they are not endorsing, sponsoring or administering the promotion.
#3 Know what Facebook do and don’t allow
You can:
- Ask people to like/comment on a post as a means of entering the competition
- Encourage people to like/comment on your page to receive contest updates/announcements
You can’t:
- Ask people to like/comment on your page to enter the competition
- Ask people to share a post/page
- Tell people to tag their friends
Facebook doesn’t allow you to ask people outright to share your post/page either on their timeline or by tagging their friends.
Ordinarily it costs to do this, through promoting/boosting your posts. By asking people to share your content for you, you don’t have to pay for the boost. This isn’t good for Facebook.
The best way to get people to organically share your content is by posting content that people value enough to share without the need for an incentive. This way you don’t have to worry about your post being taken down for breaking Facebook’s rules and you know your customer base values what you are sharing to them.
If you adhere to Facebook’s policies and the competition you’re running is interesting to your followers then it could be a great marketing tool for your business.
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