The main reason people will “Like” a Facebook page is so they are alerted of special offers and promotions. Keeping this in mind, running a Facebook competition could be an excellent idea to help boost your business’ lead generation.

Competitions not only give people a reason to connect with you, make your page more exciting, and gain more exposure for your company, but they also give you an opportunity to gather email addresses of potential customers.

What kinds of competitions can you organise?

Usually votes determine the winner in a competition, or the winner can be chosen by you.

There are a number of different ways you can set up a Facebook competition. For example, you could organise a photo contest, where entrants upload a picture that can be judged by you. Alternatively, the winner could be determined by the photo that garners the most “Likes” by your community. This method also encourages entrants to get their friends to “Like” their photo, which in turn helps your page gain more traction.

Another type of contest you could organise is a writing competition. Written competitions where participants tell business owners in 25 words or less why they deserve to win are quite common and also entail some form of engagement with your audience.

Sweepstakes

Sweepstakes are competitions where the winner is chosen at random, and are also common on Facebook.

While competitions are great for increasing your community involvement, sweepstakes are better for growing your Facebook community and email lists. Sweepstakes usually only require participants to submit their name, email address and “Liking” your business page, making it easier for people to enter. This way you will probably generate more entries, however the element of engagement can suffer.

Facebook’s Promotion Guidelines

Before starting your competition, make sure you read and understand Facebook’s promotion guidelines. By following the rules you eliminate the risk of your material being removed or your page being disabled. You can read the guidelines here.

You can also use third-party applications that collect email addresses and collate analytic data to make running Facebook easier while complying with Facebook’s guidelines.