Competition options on Facebook are expanding, with new, simpler ways for businesses to reach out to their online fans. The upshot is that it will no longer be necessary to use apps in order to run promotional contests. Though this option will remain, there will also be solutions specially designed to make things easy.
The change hinges on a relaxation of the rules around running contests through posts themselves. Businesses with Facebook pages will now be able to design competitions that users can enter by liking posts, commenting on posts or creating new posts. This will make it much quicker to put a competition together and will keep people focused on the discussion.
Fan comments, likes and posts may show up on their personal pages, depending on their preferences, making their friends aware of the competition. If they enter by making new posts, business owners and social media marketing managers will be able to comment and thereby engage directly with fans and their friends.
Apps will still be useful to those who want more control over the design of their competitions, more stylish branding or easier access to participant data. Mining data from fans who engage via posts is likely to require a lot of legwork, while apps can make this easy. Which option it is best to use will depend to an extent on how often a business wants to run competitions.
There is one other change that businesses will need to be aware of, which relates to images. Facebook has now made it against the rules for users to tag themselves in pictures they are not actually visible in, as it argues that this reduces the accuracy of page content. This means businesses will no longer have the ability to promote their images to fans’ friends by associating them with those fans. Sticking with apps therefore becomes the best way of approaching competitions if branding is heavily dependent on imagery.
Competitions remain one of the best ways of growing a Facebook page, with many people willing to associate themselves with pages purely to have the chance of winning something. Getting the right balance of competition content and maximizing gains in both fan numbers and fan data requires practice and skill. Here, as in other areas of social media marketing, Xcellimark can help.
Call Xcellimark at 888-318-3950 ext 211 to speak with an internet marketing consultant today.