Types of Facebook Contest and Case Studies

By Glenford Scott – GSCOTTY.COM

• Photo Contest:

• How It Works: Photo contests are simple and probably the most popular type of Facebook contests, users / entrants simply upload a picture of themselves and ask friends to vote for them via your contest app.

• Useful Tips: Make your photo contest interesting by tying it to a theme such as a Halloween Costume photo contests, or if you sell a physical consumer product let them upload a pic of themselves using your product, or you can base it on something simple like a “best smile” or “show your baby photo” competition.

 

Case Study: Petals and Promises (Client)

Contest: With valentines day approaching and little activity taking place on their facebook page, Petals and Promises called us to rejuvenate their facebook page and build brand awareness for the valentine season. Seeing that Petals and Promises is a wedding company. We decided the best route to take was to do a valentines day photo contest where fans submitted photos of themselves and their significant other with a love poem attached. This took a combination of design, small ad spend and campaign management

Results: The campaign brought to the Petals and Promises Facebook Page over 6000 unique visitors, 27 entrants, 1330 votes and 850 new fans. Page engagement grew over 1100%.

 

• Sweepstakes / Referral Contest:

  • How It Works: This type of contest is similar to a lucky draw contests, it’s very popular as you don’t need to do much to enter, all a user has to do is fill out a form and that counts as an entry, you then randomly select a winner from the batch of entrants. You can add to virality and make it a referral contests where users refer friends to enter also and the more referrals they make the higher their chances of winning.

  • Useful Tips: This is the type of contests you do when your main objective is to capture data to use at a later date. Make it appealing to fans with a desirable prize and don’t make the form too complicated to fill out, asking for only information you really need such as name, email address, phone number and address.

Case Study: CNBC

Contest: CNBC recently aired “The Coffee Addiction,” a documentary about our national obsession with coffee. They wanted to run a killer Facebook campaign to promote the special, so they decided to try a sweepstakes. The campaign, which rewarded a winner with a year’s supply of gourmet coffee, engaged their Facebook audience and drove buzz about the show.

Result: 9,000 people entered the sweepstakes over the two week period. They got a 64% conversion rate for unique visitors to their fan page. Over 1,800 participants opted into future communications from CNBC. They did not however require participants to ‘like’ their page to enter, and yet they added about 2,400 new Facebook fans. They also had high levels of engagement among contest participants, their friends, and CNBC fans with over 600 people posting comments. (Source: Offerpop)

 

• Video Contest:

  • How It Works: Video contests work similarly to a photo contests, users simply upload a video and get friends to vote for it via your Facebook contest app.

  • Useful Tips: You may want to add some time limits on videos so you don’t get videos too short or too long, it’s also good to play on a hot trend for the moment such as a “Harlem Shake” video contests and entrants have to integrate your product in the video somehow.

Case Study: BC Hydro

Contest: BC Hydro was looking to increase the visibility and participation of young people aged 13 to 24 in their annual Invent the Future online video and essay contest. The Hoggan social media team designed and implemented a plan that brought the Invent the Future contest to where youth “gather” online. Along with their partners at Hangar 18 Creative they redesigned the Invent the Future website  to take advantage of popular social media channels  like Facebook and Twitter.

Result: Invent the Future received a whopping 262 video and essay entries, more than 33,000 unique visitors and 143,000 page views and over 1,000 followers on Twitter. A Facebook app was developed that allowed contest entrants to market their submission easily across the Facebook platform. (Source: Hoggans)

• Essay / Caption Competition:

  • How It Works: Users simply enter by submitting an essay of some sort to you, or you may make it a caption contest and upload a picture and make entrants provide funny captions to it. Fans then ask friends to vote for their entries via your Facebook app.

  • Useful Tips: Base your essay or caption contest around an interesting theme that relates back to your brand. Eg – If your a wedding company you may want to let brides submit their proposal stories for a chance to win. This is a great theme and it ties back to your brand.

• Challenge / Quiz Contest:

  • How It Works: A challenge contest is a contest where participants perform tasks to gain points. Each point is considered an entry and the more entries you have the greater the chance of winning. The Challenge contest also gives you other challenges and chances to win once you have entered.

  • Useful Tips: As stated before always try to base your campaign around an interesting theme and let it tie back to your brand somehow.

Case Study: Enklere

Contest: Enklere decided to run a 24-day Christmas Calendar using the Offerpop Quiz app, in combination with promotions to their email list and Sponsored Stories ads. Each day, they featured a picture of a partially wrapped gift and three featured product choices below. Participants guessed which product was in the box for the chance to win it. They selected a new winner every day, driving engagement and repeat visits to their page.

Result: When they launched the first quiz in early December 2011, they had 8,600 fans, and by the end of the campaign on December 30th they had almost 44,000 fans. The fan base was increasing by 1,500 fans a day. They received 2,500 participants on the first day and it kept growing. At the peak of the contest, they had 2,600 participants in one day. (Source: Offerpop)