I had the pleasure of writing another post for the folks at WooBox. (See my first post with them here: 6 Personality & Trivia Quiz Ideas You Can Steal.) This second article is all about the social media contests and giveaways — specifically on Facebook. However, most of these tips will serve you well when planning a contest or giveaway for any channel. Here’s a summary of my post, 10 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Facebook Contests & Giveaways. Visit the WooBox blog to get the full details on each mistake. Social Media Contests & Giveaways – 10 Mistakes to Avoid
- Not adequately planning and communicating goals and expectations. You may be thinking, “Radical! We just got 5,000 contest entrants!” Your boss is probably thinking, “Where the @#$#! are the qualified leads???”
- Forgetting to provide the official rules upfront. Don’t leave yourself open to complaints about the contest being unfair just because you didn’t post the rules.
- Creating an illegal lottery. If you read the details of only one mistake, make it this one. You don’t want to be doing anything illegal, right? Winning the lottery = great. Hosting an illegal lottery ≠ not great.
- Breaking Facebook’s rules. On social media platforms, your page is merely a room in someone else’s house. Follow the house rules or lose your privileges.
- Giving away a prize that makes no sense for your brand. If you sell zillion-dollar enterprise software, a $5 gift card to Starbucks ain’t gonna cut it. What am I going to do with a $5.00 gift card? Not buy coffee. Probably not your software either.
- Requiring too many details on the entry form.You don’t need to know my blood type and favorite episode of Rick and Morty to enter to win that Starbucks card. The level of effort to enter should be in line with the prize. PLUS . . . GDPR has brought us to the age of data minimization, so be cool with the size of the data grab you’re trying to make.
- Not being mobile-friendly. People — there are around 2.17 BILLION Facebook users, and 88% of them access Facebook on mobile devices.
- Being sloppy with your copy and creative. You know what I’m talking about. Make people want to enter your contest.
- Not promoting the heck out of your contest/giveaway (properly). If you want people to participate, they’ve got to know about it. If you want the right people to participate, you’ve got to get it to the right people.
- Not measuring. I can understand why you might want to skip this step if you fudged up and made mistake number one above (or any of the others listed that could derail your contest). BUT… even data from a disaster can reveal important lessons to help you improve your next contest or giveaway.
