How to Run a Contest on Facebook

EDIT 04/12/2010 –  Facebook have recently changed their promotions policy,

• Facebook no longer require prior written Facebook approval, to administer a promotion on Facebook.
• Facebook no longer require a minimum media spend threshold to support the promotion.

As a result of these changes, you can now run a promotion on Facebook without seeking approval or permission from Facebook. Any promotion you do run is subject to Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines. (Credit to Michael Bo Jorgensen).

Running a contest on your Facebook page is very simple.

You need to be smart about it and run your contest so that it benefits both the winner AND yourself or your business.

Some things you could get people to do as a requirement for entry may include,

• liking your Facebook page
• following you on Twitter
• signing up to your blog’s newsletter
• all of the above

These things don’t take much time or effort for the contestant to do..  and also benefits you as the contest holder, as you have captured another pair of eyes that you could potentially sell to sometime in the future.

There are heaps of ways this can be achieved and this post outlines one method I have recently used.

Prepare your contest

Login to your Facebook page and enter the details of your contest.

Two things that I wanted people to do, as a condition of entering this contest was to,

1. To Like this post
2. To Comment on this post

One thing to note is you are limited to 420 characters in your page’s status update.

I wasn’t aware of this and after publishing my initial contest, I saw that a heap of it was cut off.. so I had to revise.

This tool is handy for counting characters.

When you are ready to publish your contest on your Facebook page, click on <Share>,

My suggestion is to let the contest run for a few days to allow people to contribute,

And the Winner is..

After the deadline passes you need to choose a winner and this can be done by any number of ways.

The method I used was to pick one randomly using Random.org, that way it is fair and everyone has the same chance of winning.

I got everyone’s name who participated in the competition and put them in a spreadsheet, just to make sure there was only one entry per person.

It is really up to you how you go about this.. if you want you can just tally up the number of comments.

I then went over to Random.org and then entered 17 as the maximum number, as their were 17 comments in this particular contest.

Then click on <Generate>,

A random number is generated,

This was the number I used to determine the winner of this contest, in this case the 11th person to comment.

Notifying the Winner

Now it is just a matter of notifying the winner by sending them a message,

Advise the winner they have won then click on <Send>,

When the winner gets back to you with their address you can then publicly announce that they were the winner,

Then post off their prize!

Simple as that.

If  you have run a contest on your Facebook page, please leave a comment below telling us how you went about it.

Finally..

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Enjoy!

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