3 Things Publishers Need to Have to Run a Successful Facebook Contest

Publishers have embraced Facebook as part of their regular marketing activities but most run them as a loss-leader to stay engaged with their audience.

Running a social promotion on Facebook is a great way to monetize those efforts, further engage your audience and provide a valuable service to your existing advertisers. Here are 3 things you need to have to run a successful social promotion:

A Desirable Audience

You don’t need a huge Facebook following or email list in order to provide value to your advertisers (although that helps), you just need a desirable audience.

What does that mean? For simplicity, let’s just say that means engagement.

If you were an advertiser, what would you rather have? 10,000 people see your message where only 1% of those are really interested in what you have to offer or 1,000 people where 10% are really interested in what you’re offering? Trick question, they both yield the same number of interested customers but it highlights the fact that you don’t necessarily have to have a huge audience to provide value to your advertisers.

As a community publisher, you are uniquely positioned to deliver higher engagement by leveraging your existing audience through print, email, social media and the web.

An Engaging Theme & Relevant Prizes

The second most important aspect of any social promotion is making sure that the contest is well aligned with both the community and your sponsor’s goals. Running a "cutest kid" contest in a community that’s primarily made up of single unmarried people is going to undermine your efforts.

Picking a contest that people in your community will get excited about will make your job significantly easier.

Choosing relevant prizes is easy for things like Valentine’s Day (jewelers, flower shops or chocolate shops) or Holiday Shopping Sprees (restaurants, jewelers, bookstores, clothing stores) but what’s a little bit less obviously is how to do this with sponsors that can’t offer prizes that can be easily associated with traditional themes (banks, developers, real estate agents, etc.).

The trick is to focus on a theme that espouses one of their core values. A real estate developer, for example, may want to highlight that they are close to downtown so you could run a photo contest where people upload their favorite photos of the downtown area. This ties the development to downtown itself and helps the sponsor remain top of mind with your audience. In this example, the theme is more important than the prizes but a visa gift card is a simple yet desirable prize.

In either case, one of the best ways to ensure that the prizes are desirable is to simply ask the sponsors what they think their customers would get excited about as a prize. This also gets them more involved and excited about the promotion which is good when it comes time for you to ask them for money.

The Right Execution Strategy

When it comes to running a social promotion, there are a lot of things to take into consideration. At the very least, you need someone who understands how to get the most out of Facebook posts and how to leverage print, web and email to drive engagement for your promotion.

Then there are the more complex tasks like designing the contest graphics, creating a Facebook app and utilizing Facebook ads to expand your reach.

You could do it yourself but that will require a significant investment in time. While this might seem like a good way to save money, some things are better outsourced. For example, a publisher isn’t likely to print their magazine or newspaper themselves. It just doesn’t make sense. Forget the fact that printing presses are expensive; they likely don’t have the expertise to deliver a quality product so they find someone who does. Social promotions should be thought of the same way.

So, what other options do you have? You could hire a “digital manager” to handle everything digital. This may sound like a good option but employees are expensive and understanding how to effectively leverage your place in the local ecosystem is difficult even for seasoned internet marketers.

So what’s left? The best suggestion is to find a partner that can step in immediately, advise you on best practices, and execute your contest but also have a firm grasp on the local ecosystem and the willingness to grow with you over time. This ensures that you are delivering the maximum value to your advertisers while also keeping costs low.