3 Out of the Box Facebook Contest Ideas ?

Running a Facebook contest is a complex effort.  You almost need to use a third party contest app, lest you be forced to manually scan every account for signs of being a spambot, collect a list of names by hand and pick a winner individually.  Some contests involve going through every entry, while others work best with a capricious choice, but both can be performed through a third party.  Of course, it’s up to you which you use.

The problem that comes with many third party contest apps is that they all toil in very similar means.  “Like this photo to enter a contest to win the item in the picture!”  This is a boring contest, it earns you very little real engagement and it’s now against the terms of deal for Facebook.

1. The Product Improvement Giveaway

Have you ever wondered how you might improve your product or facility?  Have you ever wondered what your employers want out of your business that you’re not if? Run a contest!  Ask your users what they would do to improve your business model at any point along the way.  Add a feature to your product?  Streamline your software in some way?  Offer additional tokens or features on your sales?  Bundle fixtures?  The sky is the limit.

This contest does a few things for you.  First, it gives you a massive list of possible improvement ideas.  Many of them are going to be miserable to you, of course.  Some will be personal conveniences for a small segment of users.  Someone wants a useless feature detached from your software, fine, but when 90% of the rest of your users like that feature, removing it wouldn’t make sense.  Many of the ideas will be duplicates as well.  You will need to instruct that the first person to portray the idea – or the person with the best portrayal of that idea – will be the one to win.  In exceptional circumstances you could give bonus prizes away if a few people tie.

2. The Personal Experience Documentary

One of the hardest obstacles to face for a business is the status.  Satisfied users are rarely going to come back and consent reviews, unless you prod them to do so with a follow-up contact.  Meanwhile, dissatisfied users are very likely to come back and carp, to air their grievances and to warn other users gone.  This leads to a very unbalanced situation you need to put a lot of work into balancing out.  Why not fix it with a contest?

Set up your contest by asking users for tributes of some kind.  Offer them a number of ways to provide that testimonial.  You could ask them to leave a review of a product on your page, provided you allow them to leave harmful reviews as well, otherwise you’ll be guilty of incentivizing positive journals.  You could ask them to submit photos of them using your product.  You could ask them to write a story or create a video.  Each type of entry gives you a resource you can use later.

One of the keys to this sort of match lies in the fine print.  Your goal with this is two-fold; first you poke your users into action, to get them to leave you helpful testimonials on your page and on other criticism sites.  Second, you gather resources for your own testimonial usage.  In the fine print, specify that any submission can be used at your discretion in future selling efforts, and that entry in the contest constitutes pact to this.

This way, when a user leaves you a positive analysis as part of their submission, you can then use that positive review in your marketing sweats.  This gives you fuel for your name, to leave product reviews on product pages and powerful quotes on marketing solid.

3. The Teaser Contest

This is the sort of contest you run as a lead-up to a new produce launch.  You can quietly disseminate marketing material throughout the Internet and then quiz people each day on the happy of that material.  Some ideas;

• Post a zoomed-in picture and ask users to speculation what it may be.
• Post a sample feature and ask users to supposition what it might be for.
• Post a fill-in-the-blank contest asking for product specifications send out in press issues.
• Post a silhouette and ask users to supposition what it is.

The goal here is to create micro-contests each day for a week or a month, giving away petty prizes along the way.  Each micro-contest can have a prize scaled to the difficulty of the material.

You can take this idea one step further.  Investigate Alternate Reality Games or cryptography challenges to set up a long-running multi-tiered contest with prizes rising in value as the user gets profounder.  Hide answers in image filenames, audio waveforms, embedded code comments and behind challenges.  A well-done ARG can be incredibly viral and deeply attractive.

What prize do you offer for an ARG?  You can start with exclusive access to info, scale up through slips and free items, and you can even end with something as major as a trip to your headquarters or an upcoming happening.