Promoting new products, and generating targeted, high-quality leads are the primary two things that social media contests have to offer these days.

Let’s look at a few factors that you should majorly focus on if you want to achieve the above mentioned goals through your contest successfully.

  •  Define your goals properly

This is the first step to creating an effective Facebook contest.

There has to be a specific and clear motto that you want to achieve through your Facebook contest.

It can be quality lead generations, promotion of a new product, etc.

It’s only then you can frame certain aspects of your contest as per the pre-determined goals.

For example, if your goal is product promotion, you can leverage certain tactics like push notifications and referral contests to ensure maximum social sharing of your products on various platforms.

If your goal is Quality Lead Generation, you can ensure that your contest promotion copies are created specifically as per the preferences of your target audience and not for the general audience, as these help in creating the initial level of engagement in case of the former.

You can always target these leads; post the contest through automated E-Mail marketing software, or through push notifications.

  • The prize

One never creates a Facebook contest to attract a generic group of audiences.

It’s either to elicit a business’s overall target customer group or a small segment of it.

That’s why it’s a big mistake to provide highly generic things like smartphones, watches, or t-shirt as contest prizes.

Such prizes will lead to unrelated customers signing up for your contests, with the only motive of winning the prize, as they generally have negligible interests in your offerings or your business.

Targeting these kinds of customers with lead conversion methodologies, post the contest, will barely get you any results.

Therefore your contest prize must be very closely associated with your products and business.

The best option would be to provide one of your most famous offerings for free of cost for a specific amount of time.

For example, if you are a firm selling marketing software, you can keep a “free subscription to your analytics software for a year”, as a contest prize.

  • The contest layout

The average social media user has a shallow threshold when it comes to paying attention or devoting a certain amount of time on a particular post or piece of content.

Therefore, you should always make sure that a potential participant in your contest goes through a highly user-friendly interface when it comes to entering your contest, filling out his personal details and finally participating in the contest.

This generally includes a clear and concise social media post, describing the contest and clearly mentioning the prize and with a final CTA, a personal details form, and a subsequent “How to participate” page, that clearly lays down the guidelines to participate in the contest.

It’s really easy for your customer to drop the idea of participating in your contest due to navigation difficulties, as he has loads of other options waiting for him, at the swipe of a finger.

  • Analyzing your contest

You should never avert this part, as this is where you get to learn crucial lessons regarding the points of success and failure of your current contest. Something that you can use while creating other social media contests in the future.

Where you or your testing services provider needs to put majority of focus  on locating those points in your overall contest page, where the customer has left, either without signing up or without actually participating in the contest.

These are the points that you need to work upon to provide the customer with a better experience and finally converting him.

Wrapping up

 Diligently focussing on these factors when it comes to creating  a facebook contest, will help you in creating the much needed difference among thousands of contests going live on facebook everyday.