It is no secret that the most effective way to increase fan count is to run promotions, giveaways, and contests on your Facebook Fan Page. But are you following the Facebook Promotions guidelines? If you are not, your page could result in being shut down and all your work lost. Below I will explain what exactly these guidelines are and what tools you can start using to run your own contests/sweepstakes on Facebook.
Before explaining any of the above, it is important that you make sure your Facebook fan page is exactly that- a Facebook fan Page. None of the items below will work for Facebook Groups or Private accounts. And if you are using a private account for a Facebook Fan Page, then you are risking the chance of loosing all of your work.
Facebook Promotion Guidelines
One of the most important rules on the Facebook Promotion Guidelines is that all contests, sweepstakes, and promotions MUST BE ADMINISTERED through Facebook applications. This means that you cannot use Facebook’s features to run your contests. You cannot ask people to upload images onto your wall and you cannot ask them to click “like” on a picture or something similar as a voting mechanism. Facebook does not want you using their features to run your promotions. The only thing you can use Facebook for is sharing. Share that you are running a promotion, share how they can participate, share anything– just make sure you are only sharing.
DO NOT notify winners through Facebook, instead notify winners using email or phone calls. This is why you must use some sort of Facebook application to generate this sort of information. On sign up forms, request items such as email addresses, full names, phone numbers, and addresses. Make sure to include a Rules and Regulations section which clearly explains people what the details are around the promotion and what you are doing with their private information. You can upload these rules and regulations as Notes on Facebook and link to it.
What is a contest or sweepstake?
Sweepstakes are when the winners are selected by a random draw. In a contest winners are selected according to the skill of the contestant (such as a photo contest or an essay contest).
Larger corporations go to agencies and have these Facebook promotion applications custom designed and programmed– costing thousands of dollars to create. Small businesses do not have this type of budget. Luckily there are Facebook applications that already exist, making it affordable to run attractive Facebook promotions. Some popular promotion applications include North Social and Wildfire.
North Social allows you to do some pretty incredible things- such as run sweepstakes. You can create a database of the information from your applicants (and also increase your email marketing lists) using their NorthContact.com forms. North Social’s downside is that it does not really provide a tool for selecting a winner or some sort of voting mechanism for contests. You might have to use a third party application for these sort of things. Panama inDesign is a North Social SuperHero and can help you run your sweepstakes, contests and promotions.
Accompany your promotions using Facebook ads. Panama still has a small Facebook user count compared to larger countries, like the US. So, you would be surprised just how long your campaigns would last and the type of traffic they could generate. By using the right keywords and an attractive advertisement design, you could generate lots of traffic to your Facebook Fan page and increase your fan count.
