It can be very useful run competitions on Facebook but there’s a few things not to do.

1.  Don’t run it on your wall

You should read the Facebook Competition guidelines and you’ll see that you are not allowed to run the competition from the wall.  You need to run it as an application which sits on one of the tabs.

2. Don’t make the prize an iPad

If you make the prize an iPad you’ll get lots of entrants but are they actually people interested in your product or service or are they just people that want an iPad?  So consider the prize you are offering and make it relevant to your target audience.

3. Make it fun

Facebook is a very social environment so why not make your competition a bit of fun.  Fans are more likely to talk about it and share it out if it’s fun.

4. Consider the judges

You can’t use the ‘like’ facility within facebook for voting so you need to implement an alternative voting system.  We normally recommend that you use voting as the first part of the competition but then have a judging element with the top ‘x’ entrants in the competition. This is especially important for photo competitions as it’s not always the best picture that has the most votes!

5. Keep it short

It’s hard to keep momentum and interest in a competition so we generally advise to run it for less than a month.  This is not always the case but generally shorter is better.

6. Allow social sharing

Make sure you have plenty of facilities in place to allow people to share out the competition, “Like” it and also comment on it.

7. Use Facebook Ads

If you want to create additional buzz run some Facebook advertising alongside your promotional activity to drive more people to the competition.  You can even target existing fans.

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