We are using North Social right now to run our sweepstakes.  Our marketing meeting is this afternoon so a new sweepstake will be up later today.  Our biggest success was our initial push back in 2009 when we ran a free tee shirt for 500 of your friends.  People would ask their friends at the time to like our page, and submit the names of the people they asked to join.  We increased around 6,000 fans in one month from doing so, about 8,000 by the time we ended it.  From there on, facebook has changed it’s sharing methods and has made it a lot harder to join pages.  Hope this gives people some ideas!

Thanks for sharing @eleniparaskevopoulou and @jonathanlass!

I’ll also share my experiences.  I’ve used Wildfire and Woobox and had great results.  Wildfire only costs $50/week and I got hundreds of entries and sold several of the consulting packages that I was promoting while I was doing it. 

I ran a contest for Facebook Page and in one week we got 700 new subscribers to her e-mail list and 400 new Likes.  And all she gave away was a box of special chocolates!  

@andrea-vahl I think this is a great “topic of the week”

As to contests, I think one I was part of is worth sharing. It ran before Christmas, for two weeks. Unfortunately, the people who set it up violated the Facebook T&C, but they got away with it. They offered as prize 5 Christamas trees per day (they are a national brand, delivery was possible). Users were supposed to tag themselves on an illustration with a Chritmass tree and, the nesct day, the winners were announced. Results? Well above expectations. Fan base grew from about 22k+ to 30k (though participation was not conditioned by likeing the page), user engagement went drom about 6% to 15%. People would encourage eachother, answer questions others post, make Christmas wishes in the illustration comments and so on. After the contest ended, a nice % of the new fans remained as engaged users.
There was a follow up to that contest, where people sent in pics with their decorated Christmas trees (won from the previous contest or not) for some small surprise gift.
Now, there were some mistakes. For example the T&C one. But I think the ideea of the contest was great.

Some advice on this subject: when running a contest, dong go with an iPhone/iPad prize just because it is trendy (by iPhone/iPad prize I mean any gadget hot on the market). Go with something related to your brand. Or, if it is not related, go with something that has to do with the event (if there is one, like Christmas, Easter, Anniversary etc). Also, big prizes are great. But (if you don’t already know) you would be surprized with how well small (but many) prizes work.

My custom apps usualy gets from 5.000 to 30.000 fans.  It depends on how big is fan base of page where I run a contest. Last one get 5.000 new fans in three days.

I guess I don’t get this concept but I do want to have a contest to giveaway a iPad 2 but have no idea what to do?

@andrea-vahl I’m using Shortstack and am pleased with the results thus far. Very inexpensive and easy to use.

We run several promotions and contests on FB for various clients. One of the agencies I represent has their own proprietary promotion technology. Here are 2 sweepstake examples: 

1. http://www.facebook.com/ExploreMinnesota
2. http://www.facebook.com/visitcostarica?sk=app_156242574458469

The results are directly proportionate to the exposure given to the promotions. The greater the exposure the greater the results.  ;)