Wondering if anyone has good ideas on contests that they have ran on FB that have increased “Likes” on your business page?  Our business page hasn’t been managed in a few months and I’ve been tasked with getting our business more active on FB and ultimately increase our Likes and audience engagement.  We are a mortgage lending company, so if anyone has any good ideas for this industry particularly, I would love to hear   Thanks so much!

We run these types of promotions all the time! They are super successful. We did a People’s Choice Utah’s Most Admired Companies contest for Utah Business Magazine and they gained over 18k likes in 3 weeks. 

The key is honestly relevant prizes & incentives.  

I hope that helps if you need any other advice feel free to e-mail me at raquelle@oozlemedia.com

Hi @trina-wambach
@russellallert made a great comment. In addition to fan gating, I’d also consider promoting ‘additional entries’ per share. This way you’re encouraging fans to share/invite/tweet the app in order to get more entries and increase their chances of winning. Win win.

~ Alexandra

Hi guys,

just one thing. You can’t add ‘more entries’ for sharing the contest or for any use of social channels. You have to find another way. One of the best is using open graph. Imagine that every person, who enters the sweepstakes has an action posted to their timeline and friend see it in the ticker. We tried it in one of our apps and it brought us more users than usual sharing. MUCH more users. 

So I’d say this1. prepare some engaging content and start publishing it to your page (once or twice a day is enough). Upload images, they get the most engagement2. create a simple contest or sweepstakes. If it has an interesting prize for your target audience and doesn’t look cheap, you get it3. support the promotion with facebook ads, paid articles on blogs, etc. Do the promotion where your clients are. You will not get many likes if you don’t do it and you will waste the money on the prize. 4. talk to your fans and answer them asap on your page

Some of the low cost solutions for promotions – dealsjoy.com, social-sweepstakes.eu. Fingers crossed

Thanks everyone for your help! As I get into this more and more, I’m realizing how much I still need to learn!  As I mentioned in my original entry, I work with a couple of mortgage loan officers and their goal (for the immediate short term) is to get in connection with their 300+ past clients and get them to “LIKE” our facebook page.  We are already sending email campaigns to these clients, but we need to get them on FB because that is where the most engagment will happen.  Our thought was to run a contest and the first 100 likes from past clients on our page will all be entered into a drawing for a $100 gift card or something.  Then the next 100 likes will also then be entered into a drawing…etc.  We don’t necessarily want to do any voting or submit an entry-type contest just yet…we need to increase our fan base first (we currently only have 79 likes).  Does anyone know if these contest apps can do something as simple as this?  Is this a good idea?  I’ve seen other companies run something on their wall stating that as soon as they hit their milestone of ’500′ likes, then everyone gets entered into a drawing…but I wonder now if those types of contests are not actually complying with FB rules. 

Any additional feedback is greatly appreciated!!!  Thanks so much!

@alexandrapotora That’s what I’m mena by “adding more entries for sharing”. Exactly as you said, the best way is to reward for bringing users to the app

@trina-wambach You can’t reward users just for liking the page. You need to use a third party app for that. Using any of the facebook mechanisms as a part of a promotion, apart from requring users to like your page before givineg them an option to enter, doesn’t comply with Facebook policy

@trina-wambach
yes, what I’d do is

1 – create a promotion (sweepstakes/contest/whatever) and use fan gating
2 – add it to your page
3 – publish a post and link to the promotion to have your fans see it and make it a sticky post to show up in your timeline for some time4 – maybe promote the contest to users who aren’t your fans to get new likes

Let me know if you need any more help

@easypromos – currently our goal is to get the hundreds of past clients who we have worked with (first time home buyers, refinancing customers, etc) to get to our facebook page and like our page so that we can stay in contact with them on a more “community-based” platform.  we already send emails to them regularly keeping in contact that way, but we would like to get them to our FB page because keeping in constant communication as well as referrals from our current and past clients in our business is key. 

My plan as of now is to send out an initial newsletter to all of our email database that promotes our FB page and our ‘back-to-school’ contest – this will hopefully get them to go to our FB link, where we will fan-gate them first (is that the term?!) and then they will fill out the form to enter in our sweepstakes.  I was thinking a $100 VISA gift card to start….what do you think?

Thanks for your advice!

@easypromos – thanks for the suggestion…I was thinking along those same lines with this first sweepstakes, to keep it simple for them by only having them enter name, email, like our page and accept terms.  One question I have…when the client comes to our page, will they have to install the application on their computer in order to proceed with their entry?  I’m guessing the answer is yes…I worry that makes people leary of the contest and individuals that are not as “internet savvy” may think its a scam.  What are your thoughts with that?

Oh – and I believe we are related to Abby Wambach, but very distant relative

Great information I can use for my clients too. Thanks @trina-wambach for asking this question and everyone for their input. Cheers!

Are you wanting the LIKES to make your page look more important or for interaction and hopefully, more business?  Of course, the latter is better, but not always easy to do.  I know Linkedin offers a couple of groups where different business owners LIKE each other’s pages.  Also, there are lots of LIKING ladders on facebook.  These probably want help you get more business, but it will hopefully help your page look more important to other people who might want your business.

Regarding LIKES, only LIKES  from a personal page counts, so if someone tells you they liked your page & you should like theirs…make sure they LIKED your page from their personal page.