This is Day 6 of the 30 Days to 3,000 Fans program. You can learn more about the program here.
While you will receive an initial surge in fans from inviting your friends and targeting network nodes, the growth will eventually flatten. You’ll need a way to drive more fans. One of the best ways to attract new fans is by creating more engaging experiences on your Facebook Page. As of the time this guide was written, Facebook has no limitations on the number of friends you can invite to a public profile. That brings us to the first tip related to a contest from within your Facebook Page.
Tip 1: Drive Invites To Your Facebook Page
Facebook currently has no limitation on the number of fans users can invite to a public profile which makes invitations one of the most important components of generating fans. So how on earth do you get users to invite their friends? Contests of course! Contests are probably the single best tool for driving more users to your public profile if you encourage fans to invite their friends. So how do you encourage individuals to invite their friends?
Right now there isn’t actually a way of tracking how many friends a user has invited but you can however develop applications which track the relative “friend density” of any given user within a public profile. As users become fans and install an application, you can check to see which of their friends are also fans of the public profile (and have also installed that given public profile application). There is one downside to this component: it takes a bit more investment. Thankfully Wildfire has built a promotional builder tool which helps brands set up promotions.
Tip 2: Create Friend Leaderboards
One of the best ways to encourage invites is by getting friends to participate in the competition. As I mentioned in the previous tip, providing incentives to invite friends is extremely important. Rather than just displaying a leaderboard among all users, displaying a leaderboard among a user’s friends helps those users set more realistic competitive goals. If thousands of individuals are competing, the odds are significantly reduced but if the leaderboard is only visible for friends, there is a much greater likelihood that you’ll get a user to engage.
Tip 3: Have The Contest Restart Periodically
If you intent to maximize the effect of your content, you should definitely restart it on a regular basis. While you could theoretically restart it over a shorter period of time, most public profiles do not have a level of engagement in which weekly or daily contents makes sense. Conversely, large brands and organizations can possibly get away with a shorter time frame just as Ashton Kutcher did with his race to 1 million Twitter followers (which was subsequently followed by a surge in Facebook fans). Large brands can attract enough buzz to jump start a contest in a short period but most companies should extend things over a month or longer.
Tip 4: Prevent Users From Gaming the Contest
So after a bit of brainstorming you’ve come up with the perfect contest idea. Now all you need to do is get it programmed, right? Not necessarily. While simple contests will not be gamed, there are many more robust contest concepts, and I’ve had a few, which I’ve realized can be gamed. It’s a basic concept but it’s extremely important. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve seen surrounding questions about the legitimacy of a contest. Often times such questions will even arise during legitimate contests so make sure your contest is air tight.
Tip 5: Provide Cash Prizes
Want to get somebody’s attention? Offer them cash prizes or something worth some serious pocket change. Interestingly enough though, this doesn’t always work but it most definitely will incentivize a lot of people. Will it serve as a valuable incentive to your target market? Maybe or maybe not but that’s up for you to determine when developing the contest. If your reader base is only interested in receiving a free Rolex, you may want to skip over the idea of cash prizes since you could very well break the bank (then again if you’re targeting the luxury market, you probably have a fairly sizable marketing budget as well).
Daily Task
Come up with at least 5 contest ideas that you could run on your Facebook Page. Run the ideas by your peers to see which they would be most likely to participate in. At some point over the next 30 days get your contest up and running!
Note
While it’s unconfirmed, I’ve received a rumor that Facebook doesn’t want cash giveaways from the news feed due to legal issues. As such, they are encouraging page admins to perform any giveaways via third-party applications, such as the Wildfire application I previously mentioned. I’ll update the post if I hear more information.
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How do you create friend leaderbords?
Comment by Mike — August 18, 2009 @ 7:51 am
Thanks, Nick! Awesome tips. Let us know if you have any questions about Wildfire.
Cheers!
Brendan
Comment by Brendan — August 18, 2009 @ 7:52 am
@Mike, in order to create a friend leaderboard you are going to need to build an application unfortunately. It would be a pretty basic script which takes the intersection of friends.get and pages.is_fan … you'd have to iterate through it when the person installed the app but essentially you'd be able to check right then how many of their friends are fans.
Comment by Nick ONeill — August 18, 2009 @ 4:31 pm
I am surprised that such an application doesn't exist yet.
If anyone comes up with a solution, please contact me I would be interested by such an application.
Thank you.
Comment by Aymeric Gaurat-Apell — August 19, 2009 @ 12:59 am
I would also be interested in a friend leader board of some sort. I had the promotion app at one point on my imagineitprintit.ca page, but wasn't ready to run a promo yet. I'll remember them for when I am ready though.
Comment by scott — August 19, 2009 @ 11:11 am
Great tips!
Thanks for the insights.
Comment by Teresa — August 19, 2009 @ 11:23 am
I'm going to try and make this work.
Comment by Carl Webb — August 19, 2009 @ 1:02 pm
this article came just about the right time. I was about to plan a facebook contest. thnx
Comment by roslan — August 19, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
Will be offering a free 50 dollar visa gift certificate to fans who press the suggest to friends button and press the share button….so far its working good
we are also gonna be partnering up with local businesses that want to increase their brand awareness via facebook by offering gift certificates, free meals, etc…i will let you know how it goes in the coming months!
Comment by lenny mauricio — August 19, 2009 @ 9:27 pm
um seriously? Most people will have no idea how to implement anything you're talking about here
Comment by ml — August 20, 2009 @ 4:12 pm
how do you create the leaderboard??? any help or tips?
Comment by davidlawton.com — November 17, 2009 @ 12:10 am
Great article. I read an article that facebook has changed their rule regarding contests involving inviting friends or posting to walls to participate. Is this true?
Comment by David — February 12, 2010 @ 12:42 pm
Hey Lenny how do you track who invited their friends or clicked on the share button? Isn't it important to be able to track this in order to reward fans?
Comment by maggie — April 3, 2010 @ 9:54 am
Great content! I will use this for my Philadelphia boot camp this summer
Comment by joyce — May 5, 2010 @ 1:54 pm
Has anyone created the leaderboard? Dying to know how to do this.. any pointers?
Comment by Daniel — May 18, 2010 @ 3:40 pm
Great explaination,now to build the leaderboard!
Comment by Carolyn — July 31, 2010 @ 2:08 pm
Hey thanks a lot for the info! I'm definitely gonna try one of those that you have mentioned! Hopefully my fan page will grow!
Comment by We-Light-This — August 2, 2010 @ 11:39 am
A leader board will be perfect. Unfortunately, I am not smart enough to get one started.
@David – I heard the same thing about contests on FB. I wanted to offer free CD's, MP3s, etc on my "I Have a Groove" page but don't want to get my page deleted. Anybody heard of the new rules?
Comment by Gil — August 11, 2010 @ 3:16 pm
What does "Gaming the Contest", specifically "Gaming" in this context mean?
Paul.
Comment by Paul — August 26, 2010 @ 11:26 am
Unfortunately this is not permissable by Facebook rules. We just created a contest exactly like this (awarding prizes based on number of friends invited and accepted), but once FB reviewed our app, they told us it was against their policies. See http://developers.new.facebook.com/blog/post/137
Comment by Jon — September 7, 2010 @ 10:39 am
what is leaderboard? did not see answer. your e-book does not explain it either
Comment by @realconsigliere — September 16, 2010 @ 2:21 pm
Thank You for this post. It was very helpful. We are researching what it takes to have a Facebook / Twitter contest and you were very helpful in this process. Thanks Again.
Comment by Cameo Necklaces — November 6, 2010 @ 10:10 am
I've been wanting to do a Facebook Contest to generate new fans for my business and was thinking of giving away a free consultation for an opt in and a bundle of our service around $1,000 for people liking the page and leaving a comment as to what their biggest struggle in business is combined with what they will do when their business gets to the point of success that they had envisioned when they first began. That way it will get some good market research and a way for me to hit their pain and goals to touch on in my presentation to them. What other things have people tried with good success?
Comment by Vancouver Marketing — December 19, 2010 @ 4:31 am
Gaming in this context refers to cheating a voting system by scripting or fabricating votes through various means.
As Nick pointed out, this is an important point to consider. I work at Strutta – a contest and sweepstakes platform for Facebook and the web – and we've dealt with this issue too many times! You'd be surprised at how many people do cheat, and to what lengths some go to get ahead.
We've developed measures to detect and prevent cheating in contests, which help to maintain brand integrity. All suspicious activity in the contest is presented in a dashboard where contest administrators can take action on fraudulent voting. Details: http://www.strutta.com/features/fraud-guard
If you have any further questions on this, let me know!
Comment by Tina — January 19, 2011 @ 3:24 pm
Gaming in this context refers to cheating a voting system by scripting or fabricating votes.
I work at Strutta, a contest and sweepstakes platform for Facebook and the web, and deal with this way too much. You'd be surprised at how many people cheat, and to which extremes they go to cheat.
As Nick mentioned, this is an important point to consider when running a contest. To maintain brand integrity and fairness in our contests, we've developed the Fraud Guard. We track all contest activity to detect and prevent gaming. All suspicious activity is presented to the contest organizer in a dashboard where action can be taken on fraudulent votes and cheating: http://www.strutta.com/features/fraud-guard
Let me know if you have any further questions.
Comment by Tina Hoang — January 19, 2011 @ 3:30 pm
Hey Jon,
The rules have changed! You may find this post helpful: http://www.strutta.com/blog/blog/what-you-need-to...
Comment by Tina Hoang — January 19, 2011 @ 3:32 pm
ok this is good stuff…after you come up with your idea do you just post it, that is where I am confused
Comment by Tjs — February 8, 2011 @ 1:37 pm
[...] contests on Facebook aim to get people to like a brand for the first time. State Farm Insurance Company is using a game [...]
Pingback by State Farm Facebook Contest Aims For Repeat Visits — March 16, 2011 @ 10:22 am
hey guys hi yesterday i saw something that shocked me!
Comment by avgerinos — October 19, 2011 @ 7:41 am
I would like to suggest http://www.blazonapp.com. I have tried the other solutions and this application brought in the most traffic and revenue at a fraction of the cost. Simple and easy to setup and use. Definitely a must have for a FB, video, or photo contest. Check out their live demo.
http://www.blazonapp.com
Comment by Kirk — October 19, 2011 @ 4:51 pm
wow amazin post im gonna stat doing contests tomorrow morning. anyone interested?
Comment by mark — December 4, 2011 @ 3:08 pm
great articles, but the application is not free! do you know how to make a facebook app contest, or where to find a tutorials.. thanks
Comment by tshirtdesignprint — February 7, 2012 @ 4:19 am