Yesterday Facebook updated their promotions guidelines allowing any business to run promotions or contests through their Facebook fan page. Contests and promotions are great marketing tools because they can help stir up buzz and get people interested in your business. Contest entrants will likely be eager to sign up to receive further promotional material in exchange for a "ticket stub" claiming chance to win a good prize (keyword is good). Running your contest through Facebook allows you to tap into your fans and more potential fans across the social network. The more fans you have and the better your prize is, the more chance your contest has to go viral.
A recap to bring you up to speed: Up until this change to the promotions guidelines, Facebook required you to have written consent in order to run a promotion from your Facebook page. If you didn't have consent you ran the risk of losing your fan page and hard earned fans and getting consent was extremely hard to do without spending $10,000 or more on Facebook advertising. Why? Facebook is being very careful about how Facebook is associated with 3rd party contests, not to mention privacy issues, knowing very well that Facebook is a powerful marketing tool. Now Facebook approves contests but they are still being very careful about how they are presented in conjunction with outside promotions, which is a smart thing on their part, at least from a legal perspective.
How do you run a promotion or contest from your Facebook fan page? There are two ways:
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Hire a web developer, like Niche Tank, to develop a custom contest tab on your Facebook page. Since it's customized to your specifications, the contest entry form can look however you want and can collect whatever data you want it to collect from your demographic. This route will cost you between a few hundred dollars to several thousand dollars depending on how detailed your contest submission form is. The benefit of custom development is that you can customize your contest form to your exact specifications, and with little to no adjustments (i.e. cost to you) you can re-use the contest form many times for future promotions.
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Purchase a subscription to a 3rd party promotion service, like Wildfire, and build your promotion yourself. A slick interface makes it easy for you to build your own contest and plug it straight into your Facebook page. There are a lot of options, probably a lot more than you need. A well structured pricing plan allows Wildfire to offer a low introductory rate ideal to small businesses ($5 per campaign and $0.99 each day the campaign runs). The downsides are your contest entry form and emails that your entrants receive will be branded with Wildfire's logos (unless you buy their beefy "white label" plans, ideal for larger companies). If you want your promotion to run for several months or run several promotions a year, the cost starts adding up. Also, if you want to ask your participants any questions besides their name and email (i.e. a survey) then you will need to upgrade beyond the most basic plan.
Once you have your contest online and running on your Facebook page you need to market it! Your contest won't go viral by itself, it needs some coaxing on your part. This might be the kicker for a lot of businesses that want to run a promotion but haven't built up their Facebook fans yet. Accumulating fans on your Facebook page is hard work (and a topic for another article for Online Success) and well worth the effort. Once you have hundreds or ideally many thousands of loyal Facebook fans you have a good basis to start marketing to. If your Facebook page has a few dozen fans it's not going to be worth your investment into a contest. Once the word does start getting out it will have a chance of going viral by word of mouth and getting picked up on sweepstakes sites like Sweepstakes Advantage where customers keep a keen eye out for good deals.
The most important thing you want to do when you are marketing yourself, aside from being true to your brand, is to maximize results. If you are setting up your contest on Facebook you'll want to make the contest available to your web visitors and your email subscrpition list as well. Remember you are giving a way a good prize (or promotion) so you want to share it with as many people as possible. The more exposure you have and the better your prize the more chance you have to get new interested participants outside your current loyal fan base & customer base. While you are asking people to sign up to your Facebook promotion it might be a good chance to include a super brief survey in order to gather more valuable marketing info.
Final note: You don't have to run your promotion through your Facebook page. The third option I didn't mention above is to run the promotion outside Facebook (on your blog, website or another 3rd party service) and then link your Facebook fans to that promotion from your wall. You will still be able to promote it to your Facebook fans. However, if the promotion lives inside your Facebook fan page on a dedicated tab, there is more chance your fans will sign up because they won't have to leave Facebook (it's cozy).
