Six Tips For Running Facebook Contests For Your Business

A Facebook contest is an excellent way to generate social media buzz for your business and attract a larger audience to your Facebook page. If you're looking to build your Facebook business page, one of the easiest and most effective ways to do it is by launching a contest or a series of contests. In fact, many leading social media managers today posit that it is impossible to build a business page without at least some type of contesting. Convinced that contests are a tool you need to start using? Great - below are six tips to help you get started!

Have Proper Legal Rules Drawn Up

If you are a smaller business this might not worry you as much, however, it is always a good thing to have your bases covered and have a set of Facebook-specific contest rules drawn up that absolve you from risk. You can have a generic set of rules created that you can use for all contests- this way you'll always be legally safe and as your company grows you can make sure your business is protected.

Follow The Facebook Rules For Contesting

Facebook has certain rules that they have created for how contests can be run on brand pages. While it isn't often that Facebook penalizes brands for not following these rules, it can happen. Instead of taking a risk, familiarize yourself with the Facebook rules for brands and follow them. The contesting rules are not too difficult to adhere to, and by doing this you ensure your company is, once again, safe now and in the future. If you set up proper contest procedures at the beginning, you will not have to worry about changing your processes later in the game.

Use a Third Party Client

Many social media managers use third party clients to manage their contests. These programs function similar to an app and make running a contest a seamless experience. Check out www.woobox.com for one of the more popular tools.

Give Away Several Prizes, Not Just One

The more prizes you give away, the bigger a noise your contest will make in social media. Having several winners will increase the "talking about this" metric on your Facebook page - which is the best way to attract new likes to your page.

Offer Prizes of Lesser Value

By offering many prizes of smaller value, you play on psychological principles of probability evaluation and make people feel as if they have a better chance of winning. People often have negative feelings about their chances of winning a prize of substantial value, however, people feel more optimistic about their chances of winning if the prizes are of lesser value. So give away several lesser value prizes and you will have a happy audience.

Have Social Sharing Built Into Your Contest

Whenever possible, have an element of social sharing built in to your contest so that you can increase the amount of interactive potential your contest holds. If you can offer an incentive for sharing the contest, people will be more likely to share and ultimately, more people will hear about your business. Running a Facebook contest can be a great way to generate hype and attract new business. Follow these six tips to make the most of your social media contest.