How to Optimize Your Facebook Contest

Social media has gained popularity very fast; especially Facebook with its user base of more than 750 million users has gathered attention of a lot of businesses for marketing purposes.

The primary motive of the fan pages is to create rapport between users and the business, effective communication creates trust for businesses and also generates more fans as the credibility increases via constant and quality communication with its fans.

One of the major Facebook fan pages promotion application is Contest. The fact is that not all of the contests are major hits i.e. some of the contests fail to attract the fans and hence the user participation is lower; on the other hand some of the contests are so attractive to users that the final user input is more than what was expected. We are trying to provide you the best possible solutions to make the contest application a success for your business.

Here are some of the points businesses should follow for their contest application:

1 – Attractive Design

The design of the home page is the first thing users will see when he/she visits the link of the application. The page should be designed so that the users are encouraged to use the application. The first impression is very important and if the color or the design does not attract the user, it means a fan is lost and he/she might never want to use your application. So, it’s better to give time and thought in designing the landing page, rather than to loose fans.

2 – Easy Entry

Tell the users how easy it is to enter the contest. Make it prominent that the information you are collecting is not going to be passed on to any third party. Keeping the sign up process simple for contest encourages the user to go ahead with the entry. If you make the sign up process complicated user sign ups would definitely decline. A lengthy sign up process also gives a negative impact to users.

3 – Contest Giveaway

The fan page should provide a complete detail of the prize of the contest. The giveaway or the prize should also be graphically presented on the home page so that the users can see what they are entering for.

4 – Ask only what you need

No need to ask the user for things which are not required. Keep the form as simple as possible for the user to enter the contest. DO NOT make things complicated for user & DO NOT ask users to provide personal information, which users might not want to share with everyone.

5 – Minimum Text

The home page of the contest application should have a lot of graphics to explain what the contest is about. Users do not have enough time to read through all the text details these days.

6 – Friends Network

Make a tab or a section in which the user is able to see which of his/her friends have used this contest application. If a new entrant visits your contest application and finds that some of his/her friends have already participated, the chances increases by 70% that this user would also enter the contest.

7 – Viral Growth

Ask users to invite their friends to also participate in the contest. You can use some kind of incentive for referrals so that the viral growth of your contest application increases.

8 – Timeline

Make sure to provide the date on which the result is to be announced. A contest application without any particular date or timeline is considered to be scam. So make sure you don’t waste your money for nothing.

9 – Share the Results

After the first contest timeline is over and the winner is selected, share the story with the fans. This increases the reliability and fans are motivated to share the news with their friends and more importantly gain more fans for your contest application.

We leave you with an example of a successful contest application for Magic Freebies UK created by Cygnis Media Inc. Magic Freebies UK specializes in giving free stuff to their users. They have become famous for it and have built a brand around this practice. Their application displays a filled jar and requires users to guess how many balls are in the jar. The trick is that they start out with only 1 guess. When a user has used up their guess, they can earn more by sending out friend invites. When a friend accepts the invite, an additional guess will be awarded to the user. We implemented almost all of the aspects provided above to make this contest application successful and the result as expected was unbelievable. The user interaction was above 2,000 only on the first day of launch of this application. You can see that the home page describes it all:

So, what all you need to do is to follow the above steps and make your contest application successful. Click here to learn more about facebook contest applications.