Brand awareness: how to run a competition on Facebook

By April 25, 2016General

One great alternative marketing strategy is to utilise the power of social media by running a competition on Facebook.

A Facebook competition can be a great way of building brand awareness and a buzz around your business. But did you know there are strict guidelines as to how you can run a competition on the site?

In this blog, we’ll look at how you can set up and manage a Facebook promotion, without breaking the rules.

Following the rules

You may have the world’s most original competition idea, but if you break Facebook’s terms and conditions, you’ll face the wrath of the powers that be and risk your business page being closed down.

It’s all about liability. Facebook does not want to be associated in any way, shape or form with your competition, or be shown to be endorsing your brand in any way.

Their t’s and c’s state that:

  • You cannot select one of your Facebook fans at random to receive a prize
  • You cannot ask your fans to vote for a particular post or picture that appears on your Facebook page
  • You cannot use Facebook to inform someone that they have won a prize.

You may wonder how you can run any sort of competition on Facebook, but the way round it is to use a third party app such as Wishpond to run and manage your Facebook promotions.

The alternative

If the cost of an app like Wishpond is prohibitive, there’s another way, that won’t be costly, won’t require you to jump through hoops, is easy to set up and can be just as effective.

And that’s to host the competition on your own company blog or website. You can do this by creating an optimised landing page and then let people know about it on your Facebook page.

As long as you don’t ask people to actually do anything on Facebook, the act of promoting your compettion and including a link to your blog or website will not contravene any rules.

For added peace of mind, you could add a disclaimer to your post, stating clearly that your promotion isn’t sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with Facebook in any way.

Hotcow is a non-traditional creative agency that specialises in experiential marketing that goes viral. Our campaigns generate buzz through crowd participation, PR and content sharing. Contact us on 0207 5030442 or email us on info@hotcow.co.uk.