Branding your business on Facebook is part of any good social media marketing strategy.
By creating branded engagement and interaction on your Facebook page, you can increase brand awareness, rack up marketing touchpoints, and spread your message to friends of friends.
An increasingly popular tactic of brand building is Facebook contests.
We’ve put together a few tips to help with your next Facebook contest campaign.
5 Branding Tips using Facebook Contests:
- Make Facebook Contests a Part of Your Social Marketing Strategy
- Run Your Facebook Contests Frequently and Consistently
- Keep Facebook Sweepstakes Prizes Brand Related
- Create Contests to Get Brand Related User-Generated Content
- Make a Facebook Vote Contest to Conduct Market Research for Your Brand
1. Make Facebook Contests a Part of Your Social Marketing Strategy
First and foremost: include contests in your social marketing plans.
By integrating contests into your social media marketing strategy, you will be creating more engaging social media for your brand. More engagement means more touchpoints with your customers.
Contests, by their very nature, are interactive content. Interactive content that is branded will reinforce your business image to your Facebook Fans.
3rd party apps, like Wishpond’s, take your contest further. Every time a participant enters your contest, an auto-invite is sent to the participant’s Facebook timeline. This makes your brand reach further to friends of friends.
In many cases, friends of friends are your target market too.
2. Run Your Facebook Contests Frequently and Consistently
To have a larger impact, run Facebook contests frequently and consistently. Run a contest every month, or even more often.
An amazing example is from Qwertee.com. They ran our Facebook sweepstakes every week. Qwertee makes limited edition t-shirts. In their sweepstakes they gave away t-shirts every week.
Their lofty goal was to reach 100,000 Facebook Fans.
They accomplished this ambitious goal.
In fact, they now have an incredible fan base of over 105,000!
Their large Facebook following is deeply active and engaged. By increasing their fan base through fun interactions, Qwertee.com has created a quirky, cool brand image.
Additionally, they continue to interact with these consumers, increasing the number of touchpoints with each of the over 105,000 potential consumers. Their regular brand-related Facebook updates keep showing up in their fans’ feeds.
3. Keep Facebook Sweepstakes Prizes Brand Related
When making prizes for your Facebook contest, keep them relevant to your brand. A gift card, or offer for free services makes a great reward.
The motivation to enter is related to your brand, so you will attract targeted participants who are interested in your wares.
Diamond Candles did a first class job of brand related Facebook sweepstakes. Diamond Candles sells candles with real rings in the bottom. They wanted to increase their reach on Facebook.
They ran weekly sweepstakes, giving away – candles.
In less than 6 weeks, they exceeded expectations for gaining an enormous Facebook fan base – generating over 30,000 new fans. Not only that, but they created a bit of a social phenom.
Facebook pages have been popping up from excited Diamond Candles fans, and organic growth of videos showing excited customers getting to their ring are now abundant.
This is brilliant marketing, using Facebook contests to spread their brand.
Read the Diamond Candles case study.
4. Create Contests to Get Brand Related User-Generated Content
Facebook contests can produce user-generated content. Set up a photo contest, a video contest, or an essay contest.
In a photo contest, for example, ask participants to upload photos related to your brand or product.
As an example, a sunglass retailer could set up a photo contest on their Facebook Page. The photo contest could be to send in pictures of entrants’ favourite brand name sunglasses. The photos will be voted on, and the top ten images will receive a $100 gift card to their sunglass store.
This will get contestants excited about creatively taking photos of these particular branded sunglasses. With a voting element, it will encourage sharing of the photo, and the sunglass retailer brand.
Additionally, in using a 3rd party app like Wishpond, when a contestant enters a contest, an auto-post is sent to their Facebook timeline. This spreads your brand exponentially.
5. Make a Facebook Vote Contest to Conduct Market Research for Your Brand
Vote contests on Facebook are easy ways to engage your consumer. Set up vote contests that include your business, product or brand. Conduct market research with your Facebook Fans by asking your customers what they want.
In this example, a toy store that sells LEGO is deciding what LEGO set to next be shipped. They cleverly put this vote contest question out to their Facebook fans, to conduct a quick and easy bit of market research to find out what their consumers want.
Additionally, because when a entrants votes, an auto-post is sent to their Facebook updates, the store’s contest is spread to friends of friends. The consumer’s friends are likely to be the store’s target market as well.
This brands the store as interactive, and as caterer’s to their customers’ desires.
It is a fun and engaging way to promote the store’s new product too.
You could use vote contests to:
- name a new product
- choose a new logo
- decide on a new product line
Branding on Facebook means being interactive. Contests spread your brand and reach your target exponentially.
Written by Krista Bunskoek @ Wishpond
The future of social is changing how we interact. Are you engaging digitally with your consumers? Wishpond social promotion apps make it easy. Get interacting with vote contests, photo contests, video contests and more on Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest and more.
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