4fbtimelineSince August this year, promotions are allowed on Facebook Page Timelines, and in his post at socialmediatoday.com, Jim Belosic offers a handful of best practices all businesses should be aware of before they get started. Here‘s a summary:

1. Create a plan/set a goal: With any type of Facebook promotion, the first step is to create a plan and set some goals.

2 .Craft your perfect Timeline promotion post: The language you use for your Timeline promotion is important. Be sure to:

  • Use the appropriate call to action (CTA). For example, tell users in the first or second sentence of your post, “Like and/or comment on this post for a chance to win!” before you get into the details of the promotion.
  • Include an image. Photos on Facebook generate 53% more Likes than the average post (Hubspot), so use a photo that features your promotion prize and is human-centric -- photos with faces in them tend to do better.  
  • Include necessary disclaimers and rules. According to the promotion guidelines, you are required to include verbiage within your Timeline promotion post, acknowledging that your promotion is no way sponsored, endorsed or administered by, or associated with, Facebook. You must also include a complete description of your promotion’s official rules, along with terms and eligibility requirements. An app is the best option for hosting official promotion rules and Facebook’s required disclaimer.
  • 3. Promote your Timeline promotion: When businesses combine a Timeline promotion with Facebook’s new embedded feature, they have a super powerful marketing tool. When you feature a piece of content, like a status update, from your Facebook Page on a high-traffic place, like your brand’s blog or website, it encourages users to engage simply because it’s right there in front of them and most important, it’s easy to take action!

    4. Collect User Generated Content (UGC): The most powerful kind of UGC you can collect from your fans (and other Facebook users) are photos. User-submitted photos are great, because they can be shared later on Facebook to feature fans in posts, or they can be shared on your business’s other social profiles like Pinterest. Photos submitted by your fans can also give your business really useful insight into who your fans are. For your next Timeline promotion, ask users to comment with a photo for a chance to win an awesome prize from your business. When your Timeline photo promotion is over, use a Comment/Like importer tool to import all the photos to a database to save and use for later.

    5. Use an app to collect valuable data from promotion entrants: If you want to grow your business's mailing list, consider hosting a Timeline promotion and building a complementary promotion app with an entry form. In the copy for your Timeline promotion, drive users to your Facebook app by sharing a link to it. Also, provide an incentive so users will want to go to your app.

    6. Contact your Timeline promotion winner: Now businesses can contact their promotion winner however they’d like -- including on Facebook.

    7. Increase Page Likes with your Timeline promotion: It’s important to remember: Facebook still does not allow Pages to require users to Like their Page in order to be able to enter to win a promotion. You can only ask them to Like status updates. This means, non-fans who see your Timeline promotion in their News Feed can also enter into your Timeline promotion. The only way to really drive Page Likes with a Facebook promotion is to host the promotion using a fan-gated app. To drive new Page Likes with your Timeline promotion, incentivize users to visit your fan-gated app by linking your app’s URL in your Timeline promotion post.

    8. Calculate the ROI of your Timeline promotion: At the end of your Timeline promotion, revisit your goals and check to see if you met them or not. If you hosted a basic Timeline promotion, record how much engagement, i.e. how many comments or likes, your contest earned. If you hosted a more layered and integrated Timeline promotion with the help of an app, gather data about how many people clicked to view your promotion versus the number of people who entered. Save your contest entrants’ email addresses in a database to use for later.

Does this sound complicated to you? Well, there might be an easier way! KRDS, a leading Social Media Agency in Europe and Asia, just announced the upcoming launch of PromoFactory™, the first tool ever that will allow businesses to create a contest, sweepstake or promotion on their Page timeline at the click of a button. The tool will be launched by 30th September and will be available to Facebook Page admins all over the world. Creating a contest using PromoFactory™, will enable businesses to:

  • Choose the type of contest they want to run;
  • Suggest the ideal mechanics for the contest (Likes / Comments / Messages / Posts);
  • Select the start and end time of the contest;
  • Select the contest winners;
  • Automatically create and launch the Terms & Conditions page;
  • Provide analytics based on participation;
  • Provide overall insights for all contests;
  • Generate report in XLS or CSV format.

According to KDRS this tool is so easy to use that it will come with no manual. Interested? Please visit kdrs.com.

By MediaBUZZ