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!
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.
Why contests are the best way to leverage Facebook
Big businesses and boutique brands are seeing huge results from Facebook contests. You probably see one or two every time you log in to scroll through your Facebook or Instagram feed.
It’s clear that contests are popular because they can increase engagement, boost following, generate leads, and give something valuable to your new users.
AND, everyone loves free stuff (here's an awesome case study that goes deep into the power of FREE)!
You don't always have to give something away for free, the power of gamification is just as powerful. Ask followers to name a new product or caption a photo to create engagement and content ideas.
That’s what Walmart does with its popular picture posts like this:
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.
Facebook Contest Ideas
Your choice of 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 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.
5. Making it Easy and Engaging to Enter
When designing your contest, consider what experts describe as the difficulty a user encounters when trying to engage your contest.
This difficulty could influence your contest to be less successful and ultimately less satisfying for everyone involved if you do not properly consider the “user’s flow” during the contest. Some questions to ask in the design process are:
- Do page visitors understand what you are offing within 15 seconds?
- Am I allowing visitors to enter my contest in under 2 minutes?
- Is entering my contest so easy that instructions are hardly needed?
- If not, when and where will fans first get instructions on how to enter?
- What will happen before, during, and after entry that will prompt the user to stay engaged?
Think about the number of boxes, so to speak, that each user must check in order to enter your contest. If the number of steps is under the magic number three, you may be in luck, especially if someone can join your contest in under 3 minutes.
What kind of contest meets these conditions?
Well, comment-style contests are highly effective because they’re easy to enter and they engage the user in the process. A simple call for original photos, designs, and captions can get the creative juices flowing in your community while serving a goal to stockpile user-generated content.
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 awarness, 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.
Think about how best to convey an interest in the prize by teasing it in the video or reviewing its features and qualities at length. Then, explain what the contest is all about, set your ground rules, and invite subscribers to enter by following a link in the description.
This may also be a good time to learn how to promote Facebook pages. There are many apps you can use to generate interest in your social post and get it in front of the right eyes.
We recommend tools like ours (VYPER) which are specifically designed for these kinds of promotions. They best leverage social sharing and referral marketing.
Growth Hack: Promote Facebook Pages
2. Encourage Contest Entries through your website
Like this contest, you can generate traffic from a contest, if you run a well-trafficked website and want to leverage your readers. Consider a series of blog posts about your prize, your inspiration for the contest, and of course how readers can enter it on Facebook.
By adding a giveaway or contest to your blog post you can leverage your website traffic and benefit in a number of other ways:
- Collect emails from the post (better conversion rate than a popup).
- Turn your blog post readers into followers and engagers using the contest bonus actions.
- Make the referral link for the giveaway the blog post URL. This builds links and gets shares which are great for SEO.
- Provide value by creating interesting content plus giving them the chance to win something.
With the right blog post series carefully written, you can have traffic running from your website to Facebook and from Facebook to your website especially if you’ve chosen to give away a prize that you make available.
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 Fizzel 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
A 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.
Respond! Respond! 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?
- If you’re looking for a simple contest, perhaps a one off contest is the best option for you.
- If you are looking for something long term and weekly or monthly giveaway might be better.
- If you have the connections and the resources a join giveaway might work better.
It really all depends on your goals for the contest. Do you 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
- 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 elses 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 nativly 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.
- 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, but 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 user’s 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.
- B2B (Foundr) - https://vyper.io/c/9232louvh
- Product (Joon Haircare) - https://vyper.io/c/8987idszc
- BBQ grilling - https://vyper.io/c/8975icmmz
- Travel - https://vyper.io/c/9576
- Travel (Scotts Cheap Flights) - https://vyper.io/c/8393bfidu
- Product (The Fishing shop) - https://vyper.io/c/5330xmrwi
- Physical product (Brevite)- http://vyper.io/c/719
- Product socks - https://vyper.io/c/4149isclz
- App - https://vyper.io/c/4162iscma
- SaneBox - http://vyper.io/c/1158 (lite)
- Foundr - http://vyper.io/c/1098 (pro account)
- Page Habit Box - http://vyper.io/c/1114 (enterprise)
- Crypto Bounty - https://vyper.io/c/4144isclz
- Deal website - https://vyper.io/c/4148isclz
- Qball - https://vyper.io/c/654
- Cannabis (embed option) - https://www.birchandfog.com/love-self-care-wellness-giveaway/
- Subscription box (widget option) - https://www.thecraftoffaith.com/
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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