I’ve recently been setting up a competition on Facebook for one of our clients and it reminded me how it can be a trickier process than you might first think.
Some of the thoughts you may have on how you want to run a competition on your page are disallowed by Facebook.
You can’t do the obvious things
You can’t run a competition on your wall – there’s no way you can ask people to place witty comments, answer questions or write you a ditty on your wall to enter your competition.
You can’t ask someone to like you, or upload content to your Facebook page – so no video or photo competitions or simply building the likes on your page.
Instead competitions have to run as an application on your page
In order to do this you will need to either work with a digital agency to produce you an app or use one of the existing Facebook templates that are out there.
To follow this route you have to contact Facebook to get permission to run a competition on your page, once the app has been built. This has to go through an account manager and may take some time; in fact you might find a response isn’t forth-coming at all due to demand levels. This potential time delay will need to be considered when planning to follow this route.
So how to get around this and what can you do?
The key is to take your competition entrants away from your Facebook page. You can promote your competition on your page and you can set it up so that people have to ‘like’ you in order to access a certain tab on your Facebook page. From there you will have to develop an entry mechanism for your competition which sits on this unlocked tab but is designed to then take people away from Facebook to your own website in order to enter the competition.
When someone wins
You cannot contact any winners through your Facebook page or by direct messaging them within Facebook once the competition is completed. The competition mechanism that you design will need to ask people for their email addresses and you then contact them personally.
One more point
Don’t forget that under 18’s cannot be targeted with competitions on Facebook.
As you can see it’s a complicated area that will take a little planning and a bit of background knowledge so bear this in mind if competitions for your fans are something you would like to explore. I would suggest taking a look at the Facebook guidelines on competitions as well.
If you’re interested in running Facebook competitions, or would like to know more, just get in touch.