3 Out of the Box Facebook Contest Ideas ?

 Out of the Box Facebook Contest Ideas

Running a Facebook contest is a complex effort.  You almost need to use a third party contest app, lest you be forced to manually scan every account for signs of being a spambot, collect a list of names by hand and pick a winner individually.  Some contests involve going through every entry, while others work best with a capricious choice, but both can be performed through a third party.  Of course, it’s up to you which you use.

The problem that comes with many third party contest apps is that they all toil in very similar means.  “Like this photo to enter a contest to win the item in the picture!”  This is a boring contest, it earns you very little real engagement and it’s now against the terms of deal for Facebook.

1. The Product Improvement Giveaway

Have you ever wondered how you might improve your product or facility?  Have you ever wondered what your employers want out of your business that you’re not if? Run a contest!  Ask your users what they would do to improve your business model at any point along the way.  Add a feature to your product?  Streamline your software in some way?  Offer additional tokens or features on your sales?  Bundle fixtures?  The sky is the limit.

This contest does a few things for you.  First, it gives you a massive list of possible improvement ideas.  Many of them are going to be miserable to you, of course.  Some will be personal conveniences for a small segment of users.  Someone wants a useless feature detached from your software, fine, but when 90% of the rest of your users like that feature, removing it wouldn’t make sense.  Many of the ideas will be duplicates as well.  You will need to instruct that the first person to portray the idea – or the person with the best portrayal of that idea – will be the one to win.  In exceptional circumstances you could give bonus prizes away if a few people tie.

2. The Personal Experience Documentary

One of the hardest obstacles to face for a business is the status.  Satisfied users are rarely going to come back and consent reviews, unless you prod them to do so with a follow-up contact.  Meanwhile, dissatisfied users are very likely to come back and carp, to air their grievances and to warn other users gone.  This leads to a very unbalanced situation you need to put a lot of work into balancing out.  Why not fix it with a contest?

Set up your contest by asking users for tributes of some kind.  Offer them a number of ways to provide that testimonial.  You could ask them to leave a review of a product on your page, provided you allow them to leave harmful reviews as well, otherwise you’ll be guilty of incentivizing positive journals.  You could ask them to submit photos of them using your product.  You could ask them to write a story or create a video.  Each type of entry gives you a resource you can use later.

One of the keys to this sort of match lies in the fine print.  Your goal with this is two-fold; first you poke your users into action, to get them to leave you helpful testimonials on your page and on other criticism sites.  Second, you gather resources for your own testimonial usage.  In the fine print, specify that any submission can be used at your discretion in future selling efforts, and that entry in the contest constitutes pact to this.

This way, when a user leaves you a positive analysis as part of their submission, you can then use that positive review in your marketing sweats.  This gives you fuel for your name, to leave product reviews on product pages and powerful quotes on marketing solid.

3. The Teaser Contest

This is the sort of contest you run as a lead-up to a new produce launch.  You can quietly disseminate marketing material throughout the Internet and then quiz people each day on the happy of that material.  Some ideas;

Post a zoomed-in picture and ask users to speculation what it may be.

Post a sample feature and ask users to supposition what it might be for.

Post a fill-in-the-blank contest asking for product specifications send out in press issues.

Post a silhouette and ask users to supposition what it is.

The goal here is to create micro-contests each day for a week or a month, giving away petty prizes along the way.  Each micro-contest can have a prize scaled to the difficulty of the material.

You can take this idea one step further.  Investigate Alternate Reality Games or cryptography challenges to set up a long-running multi-tiered contest with prizes rising in value as the user gets profounder.  Hide answers in image filenames, audio waveforms, embedded code comments and behind challenges.  A well-done ARG can be incredibly viral and deeply attractive.

What prize do you offer for an ARG?  You can start with exclusive access to info, scale up through slips and free items, and you can even end with something as major as a trip to your headquarters or an upcoming happening.

3 Ways to Increase the Organic Reach of your Facebook Page ?

Organic reach, on Facebook, is the contact your posts have when they’re posted. In case you didn’t know, Facebook’s algorithm is constantly measuring the relative meeting between your brand and each single user. If they visit your page, click your posts, like them, share them or comment on them, it increases their meeting ranking by some amount. If they stay away from your posts, hide them or otherwise overlook your brand, their meeting rank decreases over time.

The reason organic reach is important is because it’s a dimension of how high, on average, the meeting of your users happens to be. This is distinct from the meeting on promoted posts, which is artificially inflated and costs you money to pass. Sure, you could increase your engagement across the board by helping every post, but that’s going to rack up important costs over time.

1. Understand the Algorithm

The first thing you need to do is learn what Facebook considers an meeting factor, what drives users away and how you can affect your relative meeting. The umbrella term for all of this is the News Feed Algorithm, formerly known as EdgeRank.

               EdgeRank, as many still call it, is a constant calculation made between any two users. Interrelating more with someone will cause their posts to show up on your feed more often. Overlooking them for a long time will tell Facebook that you don’t care what they post, and will lower their post reflectivity on your feed. It’s all specific on a per-user basis; there’s no one EdgeRank for your Page. Essentially, you need to know what goes into the calculation and how you can affect it. Here are the basics:

Freshness of interaction. Essentially, the more recently a customer has networked with your page in some way – even if that’s just clicking on your page and seeing your feed – the more likely your posts will show up on their feeds. How can you move this? Post more often! More frequent posts, of varying types and with varying content, gives users more odds to click and engage with your page.

Type of post content. This is a little one that’s often ignored. Facebook has started demoting the value of meeting for meeting’s sake. In other words, if you post a picture and ask your users to like it for no reason, those likes are going to be less valued in the algorithm than likes on a posted picture where you didn’t ask for likes. How can you affect this? Don’t beg for likes and bonds. Yes, common advice says to just ask for it, but it’s increasingly less effective to do so. Instead, be clever about asking for meeting. Ask questions, post riddles or post images that are beautiful enough to like on their own merits.

Type of interaction. There are only a handful of actions a user can take that moves their EdgeRank. They can click links in your posts. They can share your posts. They can remark on your posts. They can like your posts. They can follow your page as a whole, if they haven’t already. Beyond that, nothing has a major result. How can you affect this? Post a variety of content that attracts each type of meeting. If you never posts links, you’ll never receive link click meeting. Post links that attract users to click through, post images users like to share, post questions users will remark on; it all adds up.

2. Make Use of Facebook Insights

Facebook Insights is the Facebook equivalent of Google Analytics, planned to record the actions and demographics of the people who network with your business page. This is an incredibly dear little dashboard, if you know what’s important.

Demographics. You can see the genders, ages and locations of the users winning with your page. More importantly, you can see the engagement statistics for those demographics. Curious how often women between the ages of 17 and 25 share your posts? It’s right there, in the Insights panel.

Engagement statistics per post.  You can see, on a post-level basis, three numbers. One is the reach; how many people, in total, saw your post. One is clicks; how many people clicked the link in the content. The third is meeting; how many likes, shares and comments that post usual. All of these are valuable to know.

Engagement breakdown by time. You can see, in perfectly constructed graphs, what times of day and what days of the week are best for posting new content. When are your users most active and most affianced?

All of this information is valuable on its own, but it truly shines when you put it together. Learn what types of people are most affianced with your brand, and what audience groups need a little love to polish. Learn what types of content gain the most exposure, and of what kind.

3. Draw Connections and Optimize Content

This is where you take your knowledge of EdgeRank and your insight into your community and combine them to increase your meeting as much as possible.

Expand your audience. To do this, expression at your demographics to find the audience groups that aren’t dominant, and determine what sort of content they like the best. Post more of that content  to attract them.

Involve your existing audience. You don’t want to negligence your dominant audience groups. Do the same thing you did for the earlie

step, but with your primary audience. This should be your main focus; keep the largest group of people affianced. Expanding your audience is main, but focusing on a core group is essential to maintain your current grasp.

Post more of your best happy for clicks. Clicks are a very valuable metric for visit, but they’re also essential for driving conversions to your website. Use linkbait titles, post partial infographics and otherwise inspire users to click through to your site.

Post more of your best content for meeting. Some content doesn’t funnel users to your site; it keeps them in place and gets them to comment and share. Ask questions, run polls and generally hearten your users to engage; that’s how you succeed on Facebook.

Time your posts for best result. Figure out what the peak hours and peak days are for activity amongst your audience groups and time your posts to be available just before the peak. Make sure they’re visible when users sign on to check, but not so old they’re buried under more recent updates.

Test with new styles of content for new audiences. At least one post each week should be an experiment, whether it’s to try a new type of meeting or to attract a new type of user. Without testing, you’ll stagnate as a brand.

Putting your knowledge to work is how you build your reach naturally and save the money you would otherwise apply on helping your posts.

5 Ways to Reduce Your Facebook Ads Cost Per Click ?

Facebook ads run on a cost per objective basis. You salary dependent on the objective you want to complete. Website clicks and page likes are the cheapest, while website adaptations are the most expensive. No matter what objective you’re using, however, you want to make sure you’re giving as little as possible per independent. Here’s how.

1. Pick the Right Objective

Facebook’s ad objectives define what counts as a exchange for your ad. If you want to sell products, you might want to be using the product deals objective rather than the website clicks objective. Why? Website clicks just means you salary each time someone clicks to your website, regardless of whether or not they ever see your products, let alone purchase. If you run the website changes objective, you pay when a user adapts, not just when they click. On the other hand, it costs more, so you have to stability this with other factors.
The last thing you want to do is use the wrong objective in a way that kills your campaign. Trying to use the video views impartial, for example, when you don’t have a video to play will just waste time and inexpensive.

2. Use a More Compelling Image


The first thing you need to understand is that you will need a number of different versions of each image you use, dependent on the location and objective of the ad. Yes, even different objectives display ads slightly differently, and this can disturb the size of the image.
There are other ad image guidelines beyond size that you need to identify. For one thing, pictures of happy people tend to be a good avoidance. If you don’t know anything more specific, test pictures of smiling people, particularly women. If you can capture them in situation that’s relevant to your business, even well.
You should also pick images with colors that stand out from the boring every-day color system of Facebook. This is particularly important for sidebar ads, which tend to blend in with the blue-and-white drabness of the rest of the page. News feed ads can be a bit less vibrant because they’re large and existing front and midpoint.

3. Use an Appropriate Frequency

Do you know what ad frequency is? A lot of first-time marketers either don’t know or don’t pay care.
There are three numbers that measure how your ads are viewed by people on Facebook. Impresses are the total number of times your ad was seen. If one person views your ad five times, that’s five impresses. Reach is the total number of individual people who saw your ad. If one person sees your ad five times, that’s one reach. Regularity is the number of times, on average, that a person sees your ad. If your audience is one person, and he sees your ad five times, you have a regularity of five.
On Facebook, you can set limits to your regularity. You should pay attention to your regularity and adjust your budget and targeting accordingly. You can read more about these adjustments on  AdEspres so.

4. Implement Split Testing

Every time I mention testing, watching or changing your ads, I’m talking about split testing.
Split testing works like this: you take one ad and create an careful copy of it. You change one thing – and only one thing – about that ad. You then run both ads for an equal amount of time with an equal audience and an equal budget. You measure which does better. Then you pick the better one, copy it, and run another test.
You can further complicate tests by running numerous variations at once, though this can cause issues with classifying which of two changes is well. Try to only test one variable at a time. For example, you can easily run six different pictures on like ads. However, you should never run an ad that has multiple variables changed. For example, don’t run an ad, a variant with a different picture, and a variant with different copy. If both perform well than the original, you don’t know which change to make.
There are all kinds of belongings you can test when you split test variables. You can change your image by a little or totally. You can alter your copy, your landing page link URL, or your title. You can change your targeting options in a million ways in the back end of the ads method.

5. Track All Data

Finally, track everything. Track data, monitor them, and make sure you’re improving in the metrics that count.
This means, of course, that you need to take zero measurements of such statistics for every ad and for your advertising as a whole. Figure out how much you’re spending, what your reach is, what your incidence is, what your targeting is and what goals you’d like to reach. Work to optimize sides of your advertising like your conversion rate, your click-through rate and your cost per click. Make changes that lower your CPC, but don’t go overboard. The ideal penny-per-click isn’t really ideal at all; in fact, it mostly means your clicks are paltry.
Each change you make should be geared towards either improving the performance of your ads or falling the cost of those ads.

Are Facebook Ads a Poor Choice for Small Businesses ?

Facebook began as a simple way to engage friends and family with everyday musings and status updates. As the platform evolved, especially after becoming a publicly traded unit, advertising became one of its core uses. Naturally, big businesses have refined themselves on Facebook use, pouring thousands of dollars into advertising and constant posts. However, minor businesses need a way to advertise to their specific customer base with a sensible price.

Facebook ads, and the inevitable business page, are not the best choices for minor companies trying to make their mark. There are several key issues that can make the ads and pages possibly difficult to manage.

Ads Don’t Equal Instant Clicks

As a recent study from Reuters was published, it showed that 80 percent of Facebook users did not click on ads or purchase those products. Although ads show up based on a user’s history of likes and hates, people were not tempted to click on the ads. However, users did say that they saw the ads, breeding some familiarity for your logo or brand. If you are a small business, your brand may not be that general yet. You need those ads clicked to expand your business information carefully. With ads taking up much of the right-hand column, the images may blur together for some users, falling your advertising impact.

The Elusive Landing Page

If you do end up with a click on your Facebook ad, it typically takes you to your business page. With the old Facebook conformation, this page was essentially your business website. You could set the page up just like a site users would reach on the Internet. For small businesses, this meant instant communication and possible sales.

With the change to the timeline effect, the business page acts more like a user’s status page. It is difficult to add elements that businesses need, from “about us” content to a expressive product text. It is more effective to a have a dedicated website to explore your product properly.

Burdensome Cover Image

When you build a Facebook page for your ads to link to, the entire top sector of the page is dedicated to a cover image. For many minor businesses starting out, they do not have the team to dream up an image, implement it and post it. If you leave the space blank, however, it offers an unsightly arrival as visitors finally click into your page. Small businesses that want to bring their ads and page into working order speedily will find a hurdle with this cover image problem.

Trying To Sell Your Brand

If you are finally able to create an image for your business page, you are faced with another difficulty as users click on your ad. They come to your page, but only find an image cover their screen. No promotional language is allowed on the image, forcing users to scroll down to see any information about the company. If a customer was wary when they clicked the ad, they may not be inclined to continue on.

Users want information fast and in front of their eyes. Minor businesses trying to make a name for themselves need to bring their products or services to the customers’ attention immediately. If a small business designs a website, most of the core services and mission are displayed across the top of the screen, along with the company name. Facebook ads, leading into the business page, do not provide enough flexibility for minor businesses to make an impression on fast-clicking consumers.

Not Exactly Interactive

Facebook ads and business pages offer you ways to analyze traffic and customer response. Although this sounds theoretically appealing, your contact with these consumers is passive. You cannot, for example, message a user after they click an ad or read your business page. Instead, you are simply building an advertising base, without any way of interacting with the potential clients.

“Likes” Aren’t That Likeable

One of the main ideas of Facebook is to “like” products, services, people or events. When a user “likes” something, it ends up on their news feed, essentially extending the Facebook ad idea. For example, your small, right-hand corner ad is clicked. The user sees your Facebook business page, and subsequently hits the “like” button. From Facebook’s basic operational descriptions, that user will now have your posts sent to their news feed.

However, posts don’t always make it to each news feed.

Resellers Beware

If you are a business that resells to other businesses, or operates in other B2B selling strategies, Facebook ads are not for you. This advertising platform is for direct customers. Although there are some businesses that operate as both B2B and direct consumer sellers, they are very limited across Facebook. It is best to look for another social media website that has a more business-minded niche.

Flashy Ads

Advertising needs to be exciting, or else people will not want to pay attention to it or click on it. Facebook’s parameters make ads look incredibly boring. You cannot make the ad stylized for your brand or position it differently on the screen. It may even blend in to the background as more interesting images appear on the user’s news feed. Advertising has more options on other websites and social media outlets.

Costs Add Up

There are different ads available to match with your minor business niche, but they will cost you. In fact, you can spend hundreds, and even thousands, of dollars to keep a Facebook ad rotating through the system. You could hire a commercial and have better response with that kind of money. As ads get larger and more intricate, Facebook charges therefore. To be truly noticed, minor businesses may need to find a better advertising platform.

Limiting Space

To compound the issue of ad cost, now Facebook has premium ads that many corporations are grabbing up. The ads are larger on the page, effectively reducing screen real estate. Small businesses, picking up the small ads, are forced to compete with well-known names that divert attention away from new ideas and products. At that point, a minor business cannot compete through Facebook ads alone. You either pay for the larger ads or find your marketing strategy stressed to be heard.

Although Facebook ads do have some redeeming qualities, many of the platform rules and design make it difficult for the average minor business to make a dent in their struggling customer base. Businesses may want to look into other website platforms that provide to the start-up world.

The Difference Between Fan Page Likes and Website Likes ?

Facebook has likes as an action for a whole lot of different scenarios. On the site, you can like a post, or you can like a page. You can even add other emotions now, like Wow or Sad – a pithy emoticon-based way of sharing feelings so you don’t have to learn to express them with words or actions. Putting that aside, though, you also have likes originating from a website like button.

There is a functional alteration in the way all three of these likes work, and it’s one that many people don’t instinctively grasp. This is why people who buy likes targeting their website like button are confused when their page doesn’t grow. Let’s take a look at each of the likes and see how they function.

Post Likes

Post likes – and wows, and sads, and angrys, and loves – are answers to a post that allow a user to involve with a post and express something to the poster, without having to really leave a comment. Likes are mostly used as a way to acknowledge a post, without having to say you do, or come up with something else to say in adding to that credit. It’s roughly analogous to some millennials typing “lol” or “heh” in an instant message, if you’re familiar with those; it’s a way for the person receiving the message to admit that they saw it and say, at the same time, that they have nothing of value to add to that train of thought.

Post likes have a minor distribution effect. They create a “Person A has liked X post” story that is shared in the feeds of the people who are friends with person A. Facebook documented that these stories were largely ignored, though, and has been reducing how many of them show up. These days they tend to only show up for posts about trending topics.

The major problem with these stories is that it’s often hard for the friends of person A to respond to the story. If post X was made by person B, and person B has discretion settings that don’t allow contributions from non-friends, the friends of person A won’t be able to comment.

That’s a little puzzling, so let’s break it down. If Bob makes a post and has his discretion settings set in such a way that their posts are public but only friends can comment on them, it will be visible to anyone. Janet likes Bob’s post, which makes a “Janet liked Bob’s Post” story in the news feed of Bartleby. Bartleby wants to comment, but can’t, because he isn’t a friend of Bob. He can see the post, but he can’t engage with it.

Page Likes

A page like is roughly equivalent to a follow on Twitter. When Bob has a Facebook Page rather than a profile, that page works like a business page. It can accumulate followers, it can run ads, it’s limited in direct messaging, and all the other features and limitations of a page.

When you go to a page and like it, you’re promising to updates from that page in your news feed. This, too, can make “Janet has liked Bob’s page” stories in Bartleby’s feed, but in this case there’s nothing limiting Bartleby from viewing Bob’s page in its entirety. Pages don’t have “followers only” settings anymore, not since Facebook minimizing Liking a page doesn’t really grant you access to anything special on Facebook as the liker. You get the page’s posts in your feed rendering to Edge Rank, which might mean you don’t see much at all. The more you engage with a page, the more of their posts you see. The more you ignore the page, the less you see.

Liking a page does have benefits for that page, though. From the page viewpoint, they can now see some information about you. Your demographics are added to their audience demographics. You show up in reach calculations. If they want to run ads to the people who follow them and no one else, you show up as a target for those ads. The page can’t message you unless you message them first, but they are free to respond.

Page likes are what you, as a page manager and website owner, want to gather in as large a quantity as possible. Post likes don’t do a lot, because, as we mentioned, the stories aren’t generated very normally and they don’t do much for you. Parts are better, comments are better, likes are generic filler. It’s a bad thing to have no likes on a page that has a high number of followers, but that’s more because likes are a sign that your followers are active and real, rather than fakes purchased through a bot reseller..

Website Like Button Likes

This third type of like comes from social media buttons embedded on your website. When you see a Facebook like button on a blog, you’re seeing something that is, itself, a lie.

What do I mean by that? Well, if you were to click the like button next to a blog post, you would find out that it’s not actually liking anything. You’re actually sharing this post with your feed. You’ll see a URL, if you inspect the element, that looks something like this

This is a Facebook URL with a script and a parameter. The parameter is the example.com URL, which would be the URL of the blog post you’rethe sharer.php, which is the same as what you see on Facebook when you click “share” on a post.

In other words, there’s no actual “like” going on with the like button. It’s a share, which posts the URL to your Facebook feed so your friends can see it. The entrance of the shared post depends on the open graph meta data of the page you’re sharing, though you can customize it by adding your own post to the top of the link you’re sharing.

Using Website Likes

One learner mistake I see marketers making all the time is not customizing the sharing button on their site. They want to see higher numbers, so they make every social sharing button for Facebook link to their homepage. That means every accrued share from every instance of the button on their site will display the same number, which is the number of shares the homepage of the website has.

It would not be the number of page likes Amazon has – 26.6 million or so – because that’s not the action the like button takes. So not only will the number of shares not match the number of page likes the page has, that discrepancy looks bad if a user notices.

The real way you should use Facebook website like buttons is to use the default for most social sharing buttons, which is “share the page this button is currently on.” Each individual blog post will get shared on its own, and will collect shares that are made of that post, but not of the website in general. There is, tactlessly, no good way to total up all the shares of all the pages on your site without some kind of custom script pulling data from the Facebook API.

• The first trick is to ignore the like button or social sharing buttons on those page, and instead just embed the Facebook like box. This plan works because of the kinds of people who are on those pages of your site.

The second trick would be to actually include the like button, but customize it. Rather than have it share as a post the page the user is currently on, modify the sharing URL to be a landing page. Of course, all of this only works and is only valuable so long as you have an active Facebook presence. If you’re not on Facebook for one reason or another – your URL is filtered, your account is debarred, you chose not to use the site, or you didn’t get enough value to make it price the time – you’re not going to get a lot of use out of either sharing or like buttons.