How to Easily Create and Run a Viral Facebook Contest

This is the be all end all guide to running a viral Facebook contest that will 10x your traffic, email leads, social engagement, and revenue. Examples included!
KT
Kevin Tang

Facebook has over 2 billion active monthly users. That means you have access to millions of engagements, thousands of emails, and hundreds of new customers if you leverage the platform properly. We are going to show you how to do that using a viral Facebook contest!

Because of the social share, it’s the perfect platform to create viral campaigns, specifically Facebook contests.

Follow our guide on how to easily create and run your own viral contest to take your marketing to the next level. It will help you collect more emails, followers, engagements, and customers.

A viral contest is a function of preparation and good old fashioned luck. This guide prepares you in every way possible to create that next viral sensation on paper, but you will need to put in the work and practice it to make it a viral success.

Along the way, we include the best growth hacking tips and suggestions for using tools and apps to maximize the longevity and effectiveness of your contest.

In short, we are going to show you the best possible way to build a viral Facebook contest.

B2C Product Giveaway Example

Contests help brands engage with their audience and build trust at the same time, but it’s key that your contest stays within certain guidelines.

That’s why we’ve included some common Facebook rules later in this guide so you can safely scale your business.

If you can get some influencers or large brands competing against each other. You have contestants referring hundreds, if not thousands, of new people to your brand in order to outrank each other.

Growth Hack: Leveraging Influencers

Keep everyone engaged by posting the leaderboard on Facebook or Instagram. Also, remind people to keep collecting points to climb the leaderboard.

The Milestone Contest

This contest type is for people who do not like competing against others. A milestone contest creates a number of prizes that can be unlocked as the contestants collect more points.

This method has been used by brands like Dropbox, GoPro, and VYPER ;)

You can create milestone rewards for almost anything. The example above is for content. If you click here, you will also see an example of how to use milestone giveaways.

Collect points to unlock PDFs, guides, videos, etc. Or if you're an eCommerce store, free product, discounts ($ or %), or even offers like buy 1 get 1 free code.

eCommerce stores, digital products, affiliates, and saas companies can leverage milestone rewards to encourage users to engage with the brand more to unlock prizes.

The Evergreen Contest (weekly or monthly)

This evergreen method is one of the most common contests and giveaway types for brands.

If you do not want to give away a huge prize, you can opt-in for a smaller prize, but award it more often.

Here's a live example of a hair product using a monthly giveaway/contest to build followers, awareness, leads, and revenue.

There are countless more contest types we could get into that other brands have found real success with, but we’ll walk you through designing your own winning contest in the next section by considering your goals.

So hold those creative thoughts for the tutorial. They will help you keep your contest unique.

If you want more case studies and examples on how a contest can fit into your marketing goals, visit our page of viral contest case studies and check out our YouTube channel.

Growth Tip: Get inspiration from others

It can be complicated trying to communicate simply (oddly enough). So, here is a checklist for you to make sure you have written an engaging landing page that is clear and compelling enough to convert:

  • Uses a CTA (call to action)
  • Stands out with CTA above the fold (fold means the part of the page that is in view without scrolling)
  • Has scarcity (time or quantity)
  • Has good images of the prizes
  • Uses dot points or steps if possible
  • Has compelling headers (write a few and choose the best one)
  • Makes a valuable offer focused on benefits

For more help with building a high-converting landing page, take a look at this example and check out this checklist.

4. Make Contest Social Posts For All Channels

Cross-promotion of your contest is key. Cross-promotion gives you the opportunity to show the appeal of your contest to many different social groups across platforms.

Use social platforms like Twitter and Snapchat to make sure that all your followers know about your contest is a good way to get the ball rolling. While some of these followers will get duplicate messages about your contest, many will see it for the first time.

Have videos and images ready to go so that you’re posting your contests to all channels with the correct format. Use something like Canva or Snappa to create good looking images.

It’s also a good idea to auto-schedule a post for every few days as not all your followers will be online at the same time you post.

The first thing that users want to know is what they get and how to enter, so make sure that your rules do not take center stage. Use small terms and conditions link in your contest, for example, take a look at this contest.

Creativity goes a long way as more and more brands turn to contests to generate engagement. While you can base your structure and terms on other contests, your contest itself should be unique to your brand.

You can copy and take inspiration but build on it to make it your own.

Growth Hack: generate Facebook giveaway ideas

You can generate ideas that are unique to your giveaway by researching other contests and experimenting with your language and copy.

If you create a contest on Facebook, you’ll already likely have spent some time entering contests of your own or at least researching them for your success. Leverage that knowledge to create something unique for your fans.

6. Publish The Contest Posts

You have reviewed your contest. You have made it unique. Perhaps you have even enlisted the help of a tool like us (VYPER) to make the process easier. Tools like this also add additional features to help design, sharing, and virality.

You will want to give your post one final read before you publish to make sure that everything is clear (and properly spelled) before it goes live. You might also want to think about opening the post to comments from your team before they are pummeled with submissions and buzz about your viral contest.

However you finalize your post, this stage is all about channeling that inner perfectionist. Nothing could be so detrimental and explosive to your contest as an unlikely loophole or an unintended spelling error.

Many followers may be willing to overlook this slight oversight for the sake of the prize, but some new users may not be so charitable with your message and contest post.

Contest Checklist

Go over this checklist one final time to make sure every comma is in its proper place and that you are ready to promote engagement.

  • Have you created a contest that will satisfy your organizational goals for your business and brand?
  • Are the contest dates correct?
  • Is the contest easy to enter and made so that every entry is definitely trackable?
  • Does your landing page have all the elements of a high-converting page? (see the checklist above).
  • Do you have supportive social posts ready to cross-amplify your contest for maximum impact?
  • Have you reviewed all the terms and copy of your contest with a professional app or service?
  • Is your contest unique and appealing overall?
  • Finally, make sure you set the contest live before promoting.

If the answers to all these questions are a resounding “YES!,” then you may well be ready to press publish on your next viral contest. Get the prize ready, and say a little prayer to the gods of Facebook success.

Users that enter your contest will have no option but to follow the guidelines set by you, no matter how unfair they might be. Most contestants will shy away from a contest if they feel that the rules of the contest make no sense to them.

If a contestant is disqualified for something that's out of their reach, then it can impact negatively on your brand. It's for these reasons that you should take careful consideration of the guidelines of your contest. Seek legal advice if you need assistance with this.

2. Measuring your Goal

Like many forms of online marketing, the proof is in the numbers.

You probably plan to use contests as an evergreen source of valuable conversions and amazing content (weekly or monthly giveaways). So you will need a way to measure each contests impact and see how you can improve in future versions.

Experts agree with this practice, but they warn that too much “trackability” can slow down users and decrease engagement as users turn away from lengthy surveys and embedded forms.

Focus on tracking key metrics that will prove to you and your stakeholders that these contests are worth the prize and their time.

If you’re not sure what you want to track in your contest campaign, here are a few examples to get you started:

  • The information that contestants will submit to my contest. (name, email, phone number, etc).
  • What can I learn about my fans and followers using a contest? This is an especially interesting question for contests with user-generated content because stats and leaderboards can be used to serve engagement goals, like in this example.
  • The organic actions that have helped growth in the past (social shares, reviews, referrals, etc.)?
  • What is the goal of the Facebook contest followers, leads, sales, phone numbers, user feedback, awareness, engagement?
  • What “numbers” will I rely on before, during, and after the contest to show its success?

Contest Data

Answering these questions will get you thinking about the data you need to collect from your contest. Many of these will be available to you through Facebook Analytics, but you may need additional tracking like Google Analytics or process the raw data from your contest in excel depending on your goals.

Take a look at this YouTube series by our Co-Founder Jack Paxton on how to track campaign performance with Google Analytics, the Facebook Attribution tool, and Facebook Analytics.

Facebook and Google Analytic's Attribution tools are built to analyze which channels are driving new visitors and customers. The video below covers the position-based attribution model (40/20/40) and how it more accurately tracks ROI by channel/traffic source.

Your choice of the prize should be an investment, it should be relevant and available:

  • Something unique. It can be a product, service or experience.
  • You should pick a prize that showcases the quality and even a little prestige. You might be held back by anxiety about giving away such a unique, or even pricey prize, but you must offer something that gets your people excited to take the next step.
  • Make sure you pick a prize that is relevant to your fans and your niche. Any business can give away a free iPad or a Chromebook, but it takes thought and passion that stirs emotion to offer something that relates viscerally to your brand and target audience.

4. Keeping to your Rules

Things get blown out of proportion online. Engagement hits and everyone swarms for a piece of the excitement.

But don’t let the heat of the moment break your commitment to your users to act fairly and responsibly with their time, content, and attention.

You want to exude values that your customers admire and associate with your brand so consider these thought starters:

  • Am I encouraging a fair and honest contest?
  • What kinds of conversations do I want to start through my contest?
  • Will the contest affect anyone negatively?
  • Am I acting fairly in choosing a winner and respecting the time my fans have taken to enter my contest and contribute?

What kind of contests show who my brand is as a person? Contests that ask for creativity, ingenuity, and passion often perform the best in terms of engagement. That’s because they create clusters and communities that bring a sense of excitement to your brand without the troubling signs of being in it just for the prize.

Encouraging passion and excitement through your commentary with fans can serve your goal to act fairly and influence the success of your campaign.

Join our Facebook group to see our co-founder Jack video review/teardown over 30+ user contests to help them with design, conversion rate, offer, and prize selection.

How to Run a Viral Facebook Contest

You’ve created your contest and now it’s time to learn how to run a contest professionally and steer your contest to success.

A successful contest can increase content engagement, brand awareness, email leads and revenue growth in ways that are unexpected, surprising, and extremely helpful for your social presence.

In this tutorial, you’ll find key actions that will lead you toward becoming a viral machine in your niche.

1. Promote your Facebook Contest through Video

Infographic: Link

Contests are ways to reach new customers and gain new followers, but it’s also an opportunity to engage loyal fans in new and exciting ways. You can help to cross-promote your contest on sites like Youtube where you communicate your contest in a fresh format.

You can also promote your post on Facebook itself. Use the Facebook tools for your business page to target certain markets and kinds of users that you think would be interested in the contest as well as interested in your brand as part of your market niche.

Growth Hack: Promote a Post on Facebook

3. Create a Custom Hashtag for your Contest

Hashtags are essential for helping your users discover your contest, see other contestants’ and start discussions about your brand that you can use to learn from your niche and market to them more effectively.

Using a clever hashtag means that you have the power to attract new members to your brand, contest, and content when the whole campaign goes viral. Hashtags can be especially effective if you need to quickly help followers feel excited and engaged in an ending or limited-time contest.

You can use hashtags for two things:

  • To get exposure - use more general hashtags to make your contest searchable on social networks. For example, these are some common hashtags to use for giveaways or contests.
  • To engage with people - This is when you want to use the custom hashtags. For example, if your company was named Modern Fizzle you might want to use the hashtag #MFgiveaway, if that is already taken you could use #MFgiveaway19

So put that thinking cap on and brainstorming 5-10 good hashtags. Then ask a few team members which one they like best. The shorter hashtags tend to do better as they are easier to remember.

Few marketers run a contest by themselves, so why would you try unaided when you’re aiming for the next big hit on the internet.

Using a contest app can help you prevent contest cheating and other pitfalls like lack of responsiveness that could keep your contest from being the best that it can be.

Growth Hack: Try a Facebook Contest App

4. Collect Entries and Respond to Buzz

Facebook entry is not goodbye. It’s an invitation to join a fan in their passion for your product, brand, and lifestyle mission.

This is especially true if you are launching a contest that takes user-generated content like comments and captions.

Always Respond!

Reply to comments on social plus send and reply to emails throughout the campaign.

Many marketers treat their contests as they would treat any other static campaign like a banner ad. This is a misstep because contests are all about engaging with followers, so make sure that you are taking steps to keep the fire alive through retweeting certain entries and doing callouts on your live feed.

Most contest marketers need help running the contest smoothly, especially when it comes to measuring engagement, creating bonus actions, and multiple reward/prize types.

Choose a third-party app like VYPER to run your contest, measure success, and make it a success. Our clients have launched hundreds of successful contests in dozens of niches.

Growth Hack: Use VYPER

5. Choose and Award a Winner

How you choose a winner matters. Every moment in your viral contest is extremely public and the way that you choose and announce a winner could leave people feeling pumped up for the next giveaway or disappointed by your brand.

Depending on the kind of contest you designed, you will pick a winner at random or on the merits of the content they created. For most contests on Facebook, the random winner is effective because it doesn’t leave anyone feeling like the contest was unfair or their submission was underappreciated.

At the same time, fans can share in the satisfaction of winning when a contestant is chosen on merit. You can share the winning entry with more force this way, and get people to retweet the winning photo and caption, gaining more exposure for your brand.

Facebook Contest FAQ

1. Are Facebook contests effective?

Contests are increasingly popular for celebrities, boutiques, and big brands. Large and small, businesses have found that a viral contest can boost exposure to the brand organically and, in some cases, exponentially increase the rate of engagement.

The effectiveness of your contest will depend on many factors from the kind of contest that you ultimately choose to the kind of prize you decide to award to the winner.

Some other considerations are whether you are cross-promoting your prize and contest through multiple channels such as video search engines, through blog posts, and on social platforms.

2. What kind of Facebook Contest should my business use?

Do you fit into any of these situations?

  1. Looking for a simple contest. Perhaps a one-off contest is the best option for you.
  2. If you are looking for something long term and weekly or monthly giveaway might be better.
  3. If you have the connections and the resources a join giveaway might work better.

It really all depends on your goals for the contest. Want to increase followers, subscribers, and fans? Do you want to generate excitement about a new product? Do you want to collect fan submissions for fresh, creative marketing collateral?

You might have one or more of these goals and it benefits you to consider your goal before you choose the “right” contest for your particular business. People are usually impressed by an extravagant prize, but something more subtle might be right for your community.

3. How do I promote a Facebook Contest?

Contests are a kind of promotion, but the cycle of applause shouldn’t end there.

A few of the most popular contest promotion strategies are:

  • Creating a Youtube series (or a YouTube Giveaway video/post)
  • Create multiple blog posts
  • Custom hashtag on Twitter
  • Referrals using a contest tool
  • Run ads
  • Encourage social sharing using bonus actions
  • Email your list or pay to have your contest in someone else's list
  • Announce on podcasts, live streams, etc

In some sense, your contest should promote itself through the elaborate and desirable title or prize-winning that you decide on, but it can be helped through paid promotion as well as using Facebook ads.

This gives you added control over who is seeing and entering your contest for the greatest focus.

4. How do I generate subscribers from my Facebook Contest?

Engage your community through promotion. While contests promote your business and market your brand in an exciting way, sometimes you will need to give your contest a little boost by using paid ad dollars and other free promotional efforts to get your community excited and interested in entering your contest.

Once you have all these people entering your contest, you will want to turn them into subscribers.

If you use a 3rd party contest tool as people sign up using their email and name, you can import them to your email service provider to build your subscriber list.

If you are doing a contest natively on a social channel, you may want to offer a free something in exchange for their email.

5. I ran a successful Facebook contest. Now what?

Congratulations! After you run a successful contest, you will want to choose a winner carefully and fairly. The way you choose a winner matters as you have thousands of hopeful fans eyeing the prize and title of being the winning contestant.

You’ll want to do a few things when drawing a winner.

  • Choose at random using a tool (VYPER for or this random generator for example)
  • Do some research on the winner (look at their email, social profiles). Make sure they are a legit winner. This is where a tool with cheater detection is handy.
  • Reach out to them to ask for their personal info, shipping address if you are sending a prize for example. You can also take it one step further and provide them with detailed shipping tracking.
  • Give them a timeframe to claim the prize. I like to give people 7 days and I follow up 2-3 times during those 7 days.
  • Once you have a confirmed winner, announce them to your followers and new audience.

Make sure you’re ready to respond to the buzz surrounding the outcome of your contest as well.

Beyond that, you will want to also consider the numbers. How successful was the contest according to your metrics? How much more promotion could the campaign have used and to what effect? What will you do differently during your next contest to maintain engagement and increase submission?

6. What are the Facebook rules for contests?

Experts recommend you review your Facebook contest rules and guidelines before you launch an attractive, yet illegal contest. In general, the rules fall broadly into three categories and are advised, but there is not much evidence showing that it is policed.

You are responsible for following applicable laws.

If you illegally run a lottery rather than a contest according to state law, you may be held responsible and Facebook is not going to help you. That being said, a lottery is a contest that requires paid entry so just don’t require people to pay to enter your contest.

You release Facebook from responsibility for the contest.

You are required to acquire a “complete release” from all participants and have them acknowledge that Facebook is in no sense responsible for the contest. A landing page is a good place to house this (and more exciting) contest information. This is built into our contests and giveaways so you have this covered in your terms and conditions.

You do not require people to use their timelines or connections.

Forcing users to share and tag a friend was causing issues for Facebook so Facebook decreed that, “personal timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions.” You can still make these actions optional or award points for a click or answering a question.

Facebook Giveaway Rules and Regulations

Knowing your Facebook giveaway rules for your next Facebook raffle or Facebook sweepstakes will save you a lot of time and hassle. You will waste less time creating contests that will be suspended for breaking usage terms.

To recap some Facebook contest rules: it is acceptable to ask for likes, comments, and messages while you collect entries for your giveaway. What is not acceptable is asking or demanding that users share on their timeline, share on a friend’s timeline, or tag their friends.

Asking for likes remains something of a grey area because it is difficult to track. Experts recommend that you make it easy and fair to enter a contest. Since liking is allowed, but not necessarily trackable (Facebook restricts API access), it is recommended that you ask for giveaway entries in multiple ways.

7. Who has VYPER.io helped launch viral contests on Facebook?

VYPER has helped many clients reach their marketing and contest goals through a technology that is as advanced as it is personalized to your business.

We try to make the process of getting success at capturing emails and leads through contests as easy and straightforward as possible. Our process is super-charged and highly effective for many businesses.

VYPER contest examples:

To get your creative juices doing we have compiled a list of some example contests to copy. They range from Facebook contests to Crypto Bounties and everything in between.

So get out there and start growing your business with viral Facebook contests and giveaways.

Not only can they be used to generate followers, but also engagement, leads, and revenue.

If you want us to review your contest or give you some ideas on what prizes to choose for your contest, post a link to your brand and what sort of contest you have planned.

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