This is Day 21 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
Rather than investing in a complete contest application, try creating mini-competitions. For example, ask your fans to go on a Facebook scavenger hunt. I’m sure there are many other ideas for mini-competitions but the point is to get your fans active around your brand. It’s also possible to generate traffic to external sites if you have more robust competitions. Ultimately I’d think back to when you were a kid to the types of games you used to play with your friends.

The games were always simple but were able to entertain for hours. Peoples’ interest in games never goes away and that’s why mini-competitions are a great way to fuel your fan base.

Five Games That Will Get Fans’ Attention

Like I mentioned, mini-competitions are not applications but ways to engage your fan base in mini games. Using some of the strategies that we already outlined in the first 20 days, you should be able to come up with plenty of games and determine the best incentives. Below are five games that we think would be interesting.

1. Profile Photo Contest

This is probably one of the easiest ones to handle. As I mentioned on day 4, having a great profile photo is extremely important. The same goes for your Facebook fans! It’s easy to get more friends on Facebook when you have a creative Facebook profile photo. Show your fans the Facebook profile photo guide for photo examples and then get them to change their profile photo. Give an award to the user who has the most creative photo. If you want to take this a step further, you can require that they integrate your brand into their photo.

2. Facebook Scavenger Hunt

This is probably one of the easiest competitions to set up. Post 10 or 20 clues about random items scattered around Facebook. Get people to come back and post with links to the content that they find for each item. The quickest to complete the scavenger hunt wins. Keep in mind that this can get extremely challenging to handle once you have a large number of fans. The more fans you have, the less clues you want to provide. Otherwise you’ll have more comments on your wall then you’ll be able to handle.

3. Facebook Photo Theme Game

We’ve already written about taking advantage of the Facebook photos application from your Page but the best ideas I’ve seen related to photos come in the form of a game. The lying down game for example, is a Facebook group which encourages members to post photos of themselves lying down in various places. So far over 8,000 photos have been posted from 36,500 members. While I’m sure that number will grow dramatically by the time this article is posted, it illustrates the types of possibilities available and how viral photo contests can be.

4. Top Score In Other Games

I have spent too much time finding addictive games on Facebook to write about. The end result is that I’ve wasted many hours in front of my computer, not being productive. However, other people are always looking for good ways to waste there time which presents a great opportunity. Browse through some of the most addictive games on Facebook and once you’ve found one, challenge your fans to beat your high score and post them. It’s a simple action but can generate a large response. Plus, you’ve also given all of your friends something extremely addictive to engage with.

5. Facebook Acronym Breaks

Joe Cockrell, a popular Twitter user, came up with a pretty smart game which is coming up with the various things a random acronym could stand for. I would try doing something similar except on your Facbeook Page. Give users an acronym such as PBS and ask them what it could stand for. It’s a great way to get users responding to your messages on Facebook. I’m sure there are many other similar word games that would be particularly useful on Facebook.

Don’t Blow The Bank With Giveaways

Before you start giving away products, you may want to consider what goals you have. I’d suggest starting with smaller items and grow from there depending on the response. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve seen giveaways fail miserably. Giveaways need to be combined with other effective marketing activities to obtain the maximum response.

Daily Task

Try a mini-competition on your Facebook Page and see how large of a response you can generate. Experiment with other mini-competitions over time to see which ones your fans are most responsive to.