Social media contests allow you to invite people to follow a certain call to action in exchange for a reward.

There are many benefits to running a social media competition, such as:

• Building a big, engaged audience. Most social media contests invite participants to perform tasks such as upload pictures, share the social media competition or submit answers to questions and therefore attracts more engagement than standard posts.
• Increasing brand awareness. Most social media contests include a “share” tab allowing brands to benefit from word-of-mouth. Plus, people tend to share a social media giveaway more than standard posts.
• Building a mailing list. Most social media contests require participants to submit their contact details and therefore enable brands to grow their subscribers list for future marketing campaigns.
• Increasing sales. Running a social media giveaway is a great way to generate sales leads or generate interest for the brand because you can follow up with participants who didn’t win, through email marketing campaigns, or even retargeting campaigns. The participants will be very qualified to buy as they’ve already expressed an interest in your business.


The first step before coming up with a Facebook contest idea and setting up a social media competition is deciding on a goal.


The second step is deciding on the social media giveaway. In order for people to happily participate in social media contests, the offer has to be appealing, unique, have high perceived value, be difficult to acquire outside the competition and relevant to your business. Giveaways that are irrelevant to your business will only attract people wanting the item being offered, and not turn into a lead or customer. For example, if you’re a fitness coach and the prize of your contest is an iPad, you run the risk of only attracting people who are interested in the iPad and not in fitness.

When you come up with a Facebook contest idea, it is also important to set a deadline for it. A social media giveaway should never drag for too long, but should give you enough time to achieve the desired outcome. Setting a 2-week deadline to participate for example, will increase the sense of urgency, and therefore increase the number of participants. Where and when the winner will be announced is also important to emphasize. Many Facebook contest examples fail to announce the winner or winners publicly, and therefore all the momentum built during the competition fades away.

Lastly, the rules of your social media competition should be stated clearly and should include the following:

1) How to enter the competition2) When the competition starts and when it ends3) A description of the prize4) Where and when the winner will be announced5) The selection criteria for the winner6) Who is not eligible to enter the social media competition (optional)

It is also important to heavily market your social media contests. Don’t rely just on a single social media platform, cross promote your contest using all your social media accounts. You can also use your other touch points such as your newsletter and blog to market your contest or even set up a paid advertising campaign.

The key when planning social media contests is to be creative. The more unique and original your social media competition is and the more unique and valuable your social media giveaway is, the more likely you are to experience your desired outcome.

To come up with a Facebook contest idea, you can either survey your audience by asking them which contests they have participated in, and why. Alternatively, you can monitor brands who run social media contests regularly and who attract a similar audience as yours.

Good Facebook contest examples include Corona’s contest. It was the shining example of creativity. Their social media competition which involved giving the opportunity to anyone who liked their page to have their picture shown on a billboard in Times Square became a big success. Not only was the prize unique and hard to acquire outside the competition, it also appealed to their target market.

Once your social media competition has been carefully planned with the end goal in mind, choose among the different tools available such as woobox.com or pagemodo.com to put it together and manage the entries.
These tools have a wide range of ready-made Facebook contest examples
you can choose from, all you need to do is fill in the blanks.


There are many different types of social media contests. There are sweepstakes which invite people to submit their contact details and where a random person is selected as a winner.
Then there is a “text submission” type of social media giveaway, where participants are required to provide information in text format such as answering a question or submitting information such as a recipe.

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