If you run a business, by now you should know that it is imperative to have a social media presence. In this day and age, not having a social media presence for your business makes you lose out on a vast majority of potential customers. Everyone’s on social media, your target audience as well as your competition who are making the most of this opportunity. It’s time that you do too. But having a social media presence is one thing, knowing how to engage your fans is a whole other ball game. Let’s look at the biggest social media platforms of them all – Facebook. If you’re on Facebook, you must know how to keep your existing audience satisfied and how to grow your numbers too. Facebook contests are one way to engage them, but having the same type of contests all the time loses its charm. You need variety. You need to employ different types of contests to bring in the fun and participation. In this post, we’re going to discuss 7 different types of Facebook contests you can use to engage your audience.
1) Caption the image contest
You can upload an image onto Facebook, and have your fans do their creative best to caption the image, where the winning caption would win a prize of your choice. These types of contests work great as they bring out the personalities of your fans, and those fans would love to read each other’s contest entries and try to outdo them. It’s fun, simple and effective in engaging your audience, and everyone haves a good time. Often, the only difficult part on your side is choosing the winning entry.
2) Fill in the blank contest
This is a type of contest where the audience is left to fill in a blank or complete a sentence for a prize. This type of contests gets people thinking. Your contest can consist of a sentence or paragraph, whichever you prefer. Then just ask your fans to add their own unique perspective by, basically, filling the blank. This is a good way to engage your fans, creating some interaction between you and them, and some competition between each other. An example for this type of Facebook contest is a post stating, “The best thing about Friday evenings is _______ “ and have the fans complete the sentence.
3) Fan of the week contest
This one is simple. It can be as easy as having your fans submit a selfie (with some description) on your post, and a lucky fan chosen by you will be the fan of the week. Not only win the fan win a prize, they’ll also be bestowed with the honor of being your fan of the week for the entire week, and their picture will be presented to your audience in a different post. You don’t have to do this every week, or you can, but there need not be a prize every week. You can just try it out for a month or so to see how it goes, and if it’s fruitful, you can continue it.
4) Favourite photo contest
This is a type of contests where the fans themselves submit photos, and they are the ones who choose the winners too. They submit, and they vote, and the picture with the most number of likes win the prize. It’s as simple as that. The best part of this strategy is that people tend to ask family and friends to vote for their photo, which can boost both on-page engagement and page likes.
5) Trivia contest
According to BuzzSumo, quizzes get shared an average of 1,900 times. While your quiz contest may not get quite that many shares, quizzes are still a great way to get engagement and boost contest entries. Some pages typically run their contests like this: users click the link to take the quiz (which they take on their external website), and then come back and post their score and like and share the page to enter. Not the simplest, yet so powerful for getting engagement!
6) Q&A contests
This could just be a type of Facebook contests where a piece of trivia is asked on a post, and the best answer, or one of the correct answers chosen at random, would win a prize. Many people may know the answer, and participate, knowing that there’s a free prize to be won. The question need not be too difficult, nor too simple, but even if the fans don’t know the answer, there’s always Google. This one is technically a lucky draw (among the correct answers).
7) Favourite product contest
Fans could be presented with a display of products from your catalogue and asked which one their favourite is, and they could stand a chance to win that very product just by entering the contest. All they’d have to do to enter the contest is comment on the post, and one lucky commenter would win the product that they desire.
Conclusion:
One should know which type of Facebook contests would work best for them. There could be trial and error, or there could be well researched decisions. You can choose your preferred contest from the 7 mentioned above. If it works, and is driving engagement and likes, make the most of it. Just choose your best method to engage with your audience and you will see the benefits of active participation. It benefits your brand in numerous ways. Do you have a type of contest that works for you that we hadn’t covered in this post? Please mention it in the comments section below.