21 Exclusive Tips for Maximizing the ROI in Facebook Competitions

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1 21 Exclusive Tips for Maximizing the ROI in Facebook Competitions Introduction There is typically a significant cost to using an application for running a competition. Paying for the application You will have to pay a Facebook application provider for use of the app. There is no need to build a custom application anymore and there are plenty of options that are relatively low cost, but still a cost all the same. Preparation of images You may need to get imagery designed to include in the competition. The app providers typically provide templates but you may want your own design. Time to set up You will need to get familiar with the application to set it up correctly. Promotion A competition doesn t go anywhere unless you promote it. Monitoring You will need to monitor your promotion activities, the entries to the application, analytics, and more. So if you are going to invest in competition applications you need to make sure that you are going to achieve your goals and get maximum return on investment (ROI) for running them. In my previous life, I used to build Facebook competition applications so we have substantial knowledge and experience building and running competitions. These 21 tips will help you to substantially increase the ROI for apps. All 21 points may not be relevant to you but I guarantee you ll pick out a few points that will make a substantial difference. 1. Consider Apps that support incentivized social sharing We recently ran a webinar on blogging and after someone subscribed to the webinar we asked people if they wanted to enter a competition to win a blogging course. All they had to do is share details of the competition through Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or LinkedIn. As a result of this social sharing we got over 100 additional webinar registrations. The application we used for this is Pay with a Tweet. This is an app set up to provide someone with a free guide when they share details with a tweet, Facebook update, Google+ post or LinkedIn update, but you can also do it to run a competition. There are also Facebook specific applications that support this incentivized social sharing and using these features can easily double the amount of people that will enter your competition.

2 Here are 2 examples: Rafflecopter I really like Rafflecopter because it is so simple to set up, it s cost effective and it has great viral sharing features. The example below is a simple competition to guess how many candies are in the jar. When you share this competition to Facebook, Twitter or and your friends enter the competition using your link they get an extra entry to the competition. It doesn t really matter to you if someone has 1 entry or 50 entries to the competition, but you can set up some rules to restrict sharing if you want! When the original entrant s friends do enter the competition then they get the same incentive to share so this results in some of their friends entering. Now you re reaching a new audience that you currently don't have access to. Antavo Antavo has similar functionality to Rafflecopter where it supports viral sharing but it also provides more functionality in relation to . Here s the viral sharing configuration where you configure the rewards for sharing. You enter in how many more points someone gets when they invite their friends to share and/or share out on their own social media channels. You can also specify how often they can gain these extra points

3 e.g. daily means that each day they can come back to the application and get more points. What I also like about Antavo is that you can also create messages that work with the campaign. When someone enters the competition they get an telling them they have entered and in this you can mention about the social sharing opportunity. Also if one of their friends subsequently enter the competition they will get notification that they have got new entries into the competition. This encourages to do more social sharing. 2. Always collect addresses When you share content out on Facebook typically less than 10% will see your content unless you support this with social advertising. If you share content through you ll probably get 20-25% open rates on this. So you reach more of your audience through than Facebook. But why not have someone as a fan and an subscriber? If you have an important message to share hit them on both fronts. That is why it s extremely important for competitions to always collect an entrant s address. You want to build your subscribers and you also want the ability to send them a follow-up after the competition is over. For example, imagine if you ran a competition for a training course. You have 5,000 entries with one winner. So there were 4,999 other people that were interested enough in the prize to enter the competition. If you have their address the first thing you should do is the other 4,999 and make them an offer for your course. Offers like this are best if they are exclusive, time bound, limited to a number of people and there s an offer of a discount or you give them some bonus material. For example. Dear xxx, Thank you for entering the competition. Unfortunately you did not win this time. But as a special thank you for entering we are offering the first 20 people the training course at a 20% discount. This offer ends within 24 hours or when 20 people have bought. Here s the link

4 3. Support your competition with Facebook Boost Post As mentioned earlier less than 10% of your audience is probably seeing your updates on your Facebook page so how do you reach the other 90%? With something like a competition there will be more sharing (especially if you implement incentivized social sharing) but you will still need to work at getting your fans to see your content. The simplest way of using ads is to post your content on the wall and click on the boost post option. This allows you to target your fans and friends of fans for a reasonable amount of money. A more advanced option for targeting is also available through this boost post option where you can target people base on their interests. For example, if I wrote a book about Golf I could target people that are interested in Golf. 4. Target Your list using Custom Audiences As we ve already said, when you send information to your list you ll probably get 20-25% open rates on your s. So you ve built up an audience that are interested enough to get regular s but they just don t open up the s all the time as we ve all got busy lives (which is pretty normal by the way). But what about targeting these subscribers using Facebook ads? Even if they see details of the competition in the they may not enter and a reminder to enter with a Facebook ad could do the trick. To set this up you need to export your addresses and import them as a custom audience in Facebook. Facebook will then try to match these addresses with Facebook users and you can then run targeted advertising based on the matched accounts. This is where you specify the type of custom audience. You can import addresses from a data file or use information directly from MailChimp. You can also use a custom audience from your mobile app or target website visitors as a custom audience!

5 5. Use a judging element with voting competitions If you are running a competition with a voting element always making sure to pick out a selection with the top votes and then put them forward to a judging panel who will decide the winner. There is a lot of cheating that can go on with voting competitions so it s really important to discourage cheaters from entering. When they know there is a voting element they are much less likely to enter the competition. When you have too many cheating with these type of competitions this negatively impacts your competition which means you get less return. 6. Unsubscribe to the app after the competition There are a lot of competition applications made available for a monthly subscription. Make sure that any app you are subscribing to allows you to leave within the month if you want. If you don t have competitions planned out after the current competition then unsubscribe to the competition vendor so you are not paying a monthly subscription. The majority of companies that are paying monthly subscriptions for competition apps are not running a competition monthly so it s a waste of money. 7. Talk with the App Vendors If you haven t run any competitions before or haven t run a particular type of competition before, you should talk with the support team of the app vendor. What you want them to share is examples of previous companies that have run similar competitions and you want them to share all the tips and tricks. These guys are answering questions every day about competitions so the good support people will know exactly what works and doesn t work so well worth giving them a buzz. 8. Test out your competition process before you officially launch This may seem like an obvious one but there s typically some problems when you launch the competition. For example: Have you tested it on different browsers? Have you tested it on a mobile device? When someone shares does the right message get shared out? Does confirmations work? You will generally find a problem that needs to be resolved.

6 9. Plan out your competition promotion on your Facebook page You can t post the same message about the competition loads of times but you can t afford not to post about the competition either. So you need to plan out your posting schedule. What type of message can you post and what type of images? For example: Wow, I can t believe how popular this competition is with X entries already I loved this entry to our competition, what do you think? Our competition has entries from all around the world Ireland 10, USA 100, did you enter and where are you from? You want to create interesting conversations around the competition and if you plan this out in advance it will make it a lot easier. 10. Partner with a company for your prize! Partnering with another company that has a much larger audience than you works a treat. Find a company that is bigger but would be interested in your audience and ask them to become a partner and donate a prize. When they partner up they will promote the competition to their audience also which will lead to a lot more entries. The most important thing with partners is to make it very easy for them to share. This means creating some imagery and possible status updates which they can use. If you make it easy they will share more. 11. Use Canva to create imagery The templates you are provided through the Facebook app provider will need some customization with your own imagery. It s expensive to use a graphic designer all the time but you can use Canva to create professional looking images easily. It s a simple tool to use where you select from templates and then easily customize the templates. Try it and I promise you ll love it! 12. Use vendors that support mobile There are still some vendors that don t have mobile compatible Facebook applications so make sure to avoid them. It s likely that more people will try to enter your competition from a mobile app instead of the desktop so the mobile app should work even better than the desktop!

7 13. Pick a relevant prize Don t be tempted to give away an ipad as a prize. An ipad attracts everyone but your target audience is not everyone. Pick a prize that is only relevant to your target audience. I worked with a golf course years ago and instead of giving an ipad for a prize I advised them to give away a few prizes like a free 4-ball round of golf and a free-round with the course pro-golfer. The cost to them was low but the value to golfers was high. Only people that were interested in golf or knew someone they could give the prize to would enter, so it was a very relevant audience. The competition is not about how many people enter. It s about building a relevant audience. 14. Fan-gate your competitions Fan gating means you restrict entry to the competition to fans only. If someone tries to enter the competition and they are not a fan they will not be able to enter it until they like your page. You want to build s subscribers but you also want to build fans! 15. Make it simple to enter If you present 10 fields for people to complete in order to enter the competition this is going to cause friction which results in less people entering. You need to strike a balance and only collect the minimum amount of information you truly require. Ask for name and and possibly a question which helps you understand and target the audience. 16. Use an App provider that collects and analyzes the data Because collecting data from the entrants can be tricky you need some other means to understand your new audience. And since Facebook stores a ton of valuable data about each person then having an app that analyzes and presents this data to you helps you really understand the type of entrants your competition has attracted so you can decide if this type of competition works well for you. If you use Agorapulse to run your competitions it will store all the details of the person who entered on their profile. Their profile displays when they interacted with your page but also records all the competitions they ever entered. This is great if you want to do some targeting in the future. 17. Consider regular competitions Regular competitions can also work quite well. For example, each month you are running a competition for a meal for 2 at your restaurant. This keeps people as a fan of your page and drives up engagement each month. It can be low cost and you can use the same templates each month so it becomes easier to run them.

8 18. Promote it with your timeline cover Why not create a timeline cover that promotes the competition and then you can create a post about the competition that gets pinned to the top of the newsfeed. The following is not a competition but you ll get the idea. We re promoting a webinar and we point to a post that is pinned (stays there for 7 days) at the top so new fans always see it. 19. Track Sharing with Google UTM Codes We re getting a bit technical but stay with me! When you share out the link to your competition on Facebook, Twitter, Facebook Ads, Google+ etc., how do you know which link resulted in visits to your competition page? Here s an example of how you can track this. If you are using the link to the competition with a Facebook Ad you can add some additional information to the link so show where the link was shared. You can then view this information in Google analytics (campaign section). The easiest way of creating these codes is the Chrome URL builder plugin which you can see below.

9 When you re on the page where the competition is running you click on the link for the plugin in the toolbar and the above screen pops up. Put in the source where you are going to share the link and the medium which is how it s going to be shared (e.g. Facebook ad). You can then add a campaign name which will be displayed in Google Analytics. The campaign name should be identical (including capitalization and spacing) for every link created for the same campaign. This ensures all the data for this campaign appears together in Google Analytics. The term and content sections are optional and I rarely use them. Here s a look at the campaigns section in Google analytics. Create a unique link for every place you are going to share the content. As an extra step, what I normally do is go to bit.ly to shorten this link so it s not a really long link. You can now track the traffic generated from each link.

10 20. Tell previous entrants! If you have the right tool in place you would have collected addresses and tagged them to show they became subscribers by running your competition. In the previous example for the restaurant running a monthly competition, for each competition I m going to all the previous entrants that didn t win and tell them about the new competition. They are already subscribers and probably fans but getting them to enter will help build engagement on your page and also with the viral sharing tricks they will bring more people into the competition. 21. Involve your fans There s no better way in getting your fans involved than by simply asking them what type of competition you should run and what sort of prize you should give away. Give them a few options that you are happy with. When you share out a question like this make sure to use the boost post option to run an inexpensive ad to reach more people. You want to get as much participation as possible at this stage. Summary Facebook competitions can really provide a lot of value for a relatively low cost if you implement them correctly. Follow a selection of tips in this guide and you ll certainly see a much bigger return on investment.