4 Facebook Contests Ideas for Businesses to Engage Fans and Generate Leads

Facebook has long since been accepted as the ultimate social platform to promote your business. Nowadays, if you are not on Facebook, you’re missing out on one of the largest audiences bases there is online, and by extension, missing out on potential customers, too. The reasons for this are many, but the biggest two causes of Facebook’s wide adoption by businesses are:

a) The size of the audience is, frankly, larger than any other social network, and

b) Facebook updates its platform constantly to be more advertiser-friendly – and it works!

Gaining fans and keeping them engaged is definitely one of the challenges of Facebook Marketing, however, for businesses looking to do effective Facebook Marketing, the challenge is to also convert these fans into leads, and hopefully, customer.

The best proven to do all of what is mentioned above is to run a contest on Facebook. Running one is no feat, since there are dozens of Facebook Contest apps available to do this exact task for you, minus a hassle. Here are 5 simple contest ideas you can run using a Facebook contests app:

1) Photo Contest: A Facebook Photo Contest is the most popular type of contest on Facebook. It’s simple, visual, and incredibly easy to set up and participate in. Have users ‘Like’ you page and submit their photos on the specified theme. Make sure to pick an app that allows voting by other users. This will help decide the winner, and also have your photo contest go viral.

2) Scratch & Win: This is a novel concept that hasn’t been used by many brands yet, so the time is absolutely ripe to run a Facebook Scratch and Win contest of your own. Incredibly easy to set up, Scratch & Win lets your fan scratch a sort of virtual scratch-off lottery to discover the prize (or the lack of it) underneath. It’s easy to play, and users can participate once every 24 hours, so in case they lose, you can bet that they’re coming back again to try.

3) Timeline Contest: This is the simplest, and the most engaging of the lot as you run such a contest right from your Facebook brand page’s timeline. Just share an update on your page and as users to ‘Like’ or ‘Comment’ on the update to get a chance to win. The issue, however, with such a contest is that managing the entries can be an insurmountable task, and while such a contest is sure to generate interactions on your page, it will not help you generate leads. You can take care of both these issues and more by simply using a Timeline Contest app for Facebook.

4) Caption Contest: Similar to a photo contest, however with its own twist, a Caption Contest is a fantastic way to get user-generated content. Simply upload a photo depicting your product or service and have fans provide a catchphrase or caption to participate. Again, keep in mind to find a Facebook Caption Contest app with a voting mechanism.

Things to keep in mind while hosting any of the contests mentioned above is to ensure that the theme of the contest is simple enough to resonate with as many Facebook users as possible, while still ensuring that it holds enough recall for your brand to differentiate your contest from others. Be sure to offer exciting prizes, as that is what will convince users about participating in the first place. Exciting doesn’t necessarily mean expensive, bear in mind, so be sure to think out of the box.