Facebook Competitions – You Can’t Buy Love.
One of the best things about the rise of social media marketing is the potential for small business to compete with big business on an even playing field.
With platforms such as Facebook, the ability to target your audience specifically and fully utilise your page insights is key to the success of your business presence.
Yet, if I had a dollar for every time I saw a business running a Like, Tag and Share competition on Facebook… I’d be drinking a cocktail by a pool in Hawaii right now.
Here are 5 reasons why you shouldn’t run a Like, Tag and Share competition on Facebook –
It’s a breach of Facebook guidelines.
You are responsible for your business page complying with the Facebook regulations – and if you are found to breach these then they can kick you off. Within their guidelines it clearly states “Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries”, and “tag your friends in this post to enter” are not permitted).
If that’s not good enough, read on…
You can’t buy love.
You may see a spike in your Follower numbers immediately after running a competition, however of those Followers, how many of them are actually interested in your business or product? Human nature is that if we see an opportunity to win something, we will give it a go. Once I entered a competition to win a year’s supply of Pizza. I don’t even like Pizza.
The fact is, you can’t buy love. Latest research tells us that the organic (not paid) reach of our Posts is between 2 – 6% and declining. Facebook are prioritizing updates from our personal connections over business pages. Strategic from a Facebook perspective as this means that businesses will put money behind their Posts (boosting them) to increase interaction. So, if you have 1000 Followers and only 2% of them are seeing your Posts organically (20 Followers) you want to be confident those 20 people are genuinely interested in your business, products and services.Don’t spray and pray.
Be selective about what you post. Make sure your Posts are strategically linked to your objective and targeted to your audience – you will improve engagement. If you’re putting up random Posts daily your genuine Followers will get brand fatigue and switch off.
Clicks are good. Sales are better.
A shrinking number of people seeing your Page’s organic posts on Facebook means fewer clicks, comments, and shares. Having fewer of those interactions means fewer leads, and customers. So, ensure your organic audience is seeing content that resonates and engages with them.
It’s messing with your data.
Through Facebook insights you have the ability to see how many people are connecting with your business page. You can learn lots about your audience, reach, engagement, page views, actions and posts. This information is invaluable and gives us the power to customise and track our content for optimal results. If you ran a Like, Tag and Share competition and your Page Followers increased by 150%, it’s going to have a massive impact on your data – changing the way you customise and optimise your future content. The question to ask is – is the demographic data a positive reflection of your preferred target audience?
There you have it. With the new era of social media advertising at our disposal we have the capacity to be smarter, more strategic, targeted and cost effective with our marketing approach.
Gone are the days when we would put an advert in the newspaper and hope that our target audience would take notice of it. So don’t let this out dated mind set creep into your social media advertising philosophy.