5 Best Practices For Your Facebook Timeline Giveaway

Facebook Timeline Giveaway Best Practices

Facebook allows you to run promotions directly on your Facebook page timeline, Facebook page owners have yet another way to engage with their Facebook community. Good news, we have an app that will allow you to randomly select winners to your Facebook timeline giveaways.

The app is called the Facebook Flash Giveaway App. It’s free to use and super-easy to navigate.

But as a Facebook page administrator, there’s still a bit of work for you to do on your end to make sure your promotion runs smoother than butter. In this post, you’ll learn about several best practices you might take when it comes to running your first giveaway on your Facebook page timeline.

5 Facebook Page Timeline Promotion Best Practices

1. Don’t Ignore Terms & Conditions

Even though it’s no longer required to use a 3rd party app to run a promotion on Facebook, as the Facebook page administrator, it’s still up to you to manage the legal aspects of your giveaway. That includes your promotion’s rules & eligibility requirements, terms & conditions, and a complete release of Facebook.

To fall in compliance, link to your promotion’s term and conditions directly from your status update. Being transparent with your participants should be important to you.

2. Make Your Post Visible

There are several steps you can take to get your Facebook timeline giveaway more visibility.

  • Well-written ad copy. Keep your status update short & memorable. Include a clear call-to-action. Let your entrants know how they can enter and what they’re eligible to win.
  • Hashtags. Including relevant hashtags in your promotion post might bring your post additional eyeballs to your #giveaway.
  • Get visual. Upload an image with your timeline post. Include an image of the prize or a designed post image that gets folks excited about your promotion.
  • Embeddable posts. If you’re running your promotion alongside a product release, consider embedding your Facebook status update into a blog post for additional visibility.
  • Promoted posts. Put some money towards your post for some extra oomph — you’ll never know how effective it might be until you try. For more information surrounding promoted posts, visit Facebook’s Promoted Post FAQs.

Ssing the visibility suggestions above, run several giveaways a month to get a feel for what works best for you.

3. One Day Only — Keep Your Promotion Short

Facebook Flash Giveaway

Using a status update to run a giveaway is perfect if you’re looking to give back to your community in bite-sized ways. Give out some swag, some stickers, maybe some invite codes to your product.

Running a giveaway on your timeline that lasts longer than 24 hours might not bring you the return you might expect. Due to Facebook’s EdgeRank, the Facebook post you created earlier in the week will get very low visibility in your follower’s news feeds.

4. Like, Comment, & Share

We realize you were taught to share growing up, but asking entrants to share the promotion on their personal timeline or on a friend’s timeline as a means of entry isn’t allowed. Your giveaway must take place on your Facebook page, not your Facebook personal profile.

*Psst* Want to learn about Facebook’s rules pertaining to giveaways? Check out our Facebook Promotion Guidelines page.

Because these new guidelines are still in its infancy, it’s difficult to say if Facebook will be more strict with their guidelines now they’re more intuitive in relation to the previous promotion guidelines. Time will tell how strict Facebook is with monitoring these rules.

5. Contact Your Winners Efficiently

Per the new Facebook promotion guidelines, Facebook now allows you to contact giveaway winners through a message. This is great because you don’t need to collect participants’ email addresses for timeline promotions, but when it comes time to contacting winners, if the entrant isn’t connected to you on Facebook, the message you send them will be placed in their ‘other’ messages folder.

You might consider trying to contact winners of the giveaway not just through a Facebook message, but by tagging the winners chosen in the comments section of the original Facebook promotion timeline post. Hopefully between being messaged and tagged, your winners will be able to respond to claim their prize.

Examples of Facebook Timeline Promotions

You’ve followed the above best practices and are ready to rock. Over the next month, we’ll be running a handful of giveaways on our Facebook page. Keep your eyes peeled! As we run them, we’ll embed the posts here to show what your Facebook timeline giveaway might look like on your page as well as your fan’s news feeds.

 

Post by Rafflecopter.

 

 

Post by Rafflecopter.

 

Post by Rafflecopter.

Post by Rafflecopter.

Post by Rafflecopter.

Have you run any giveaways on your Facebook page yet? Link us to an example or let us know your tips & tricks in the comments below!Enhanced by Zemanta

About the author

Greg Goodson

Greg Goodson is the cofounder of Rafflecopter. 25x ultramarathoner, bluegrass guitarist, & weather enthusiast. Owner of one doge.

  • I ran a small giveaway on my own blog page when the rules changed and got a good response! http://on.fb.me/14L3HtF

    An important piece of advice we should be telling promoters is NOT to announce a winner in a timeline post/comment and ask them to email their address details. This gives a dishonest person the opportunity to claim the prize as their own – this is happening often here in the UK. Promoters should always send a Facebook message, and in their wall post ask the winner to check their ‘Other’ inbox. If the promoter doesn’t want to send a message from a personal account, they could request in their status or comment that the winner should send a Facebook message to the company page.

    • Jordan Sanders

      Hey Di,

      Excellent point, thanks so much for sharing. I’m sure folks will find that helpful to know :).

    • Good call – never crossed my mind when I wrote this post. Thanks for the tip!

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  • Stampendous Stamps

    Another great tip is the fact that Facebook is INTERNATIONAL – if you can ship your product to other countries easily or if customs charges could be a problem for your winners, be SURE that you’re VERY clear up front about residency restrictions on any contest. We sometimes forget that and my first giveaway included two of three winners from outside the US. Now I have to figure out the least expensive way to get those folks their prizes!

    • Jordan Sanders

      Another good point, definitely something for people running a giveaway to remember. Thanks!

  • Chris Pedersen

    I know you can’t ask entrants to share on their timeline, but can they choose to do it? Do I have that right?

    • your fans are more than welcome to share your giveaway as much as they want! you can even ask them to share your giveaway, but if you do, just let them know that sharing isn’t a requirement of entering

      • Update: it appears that even a call to action “share this with your friends” even when it’s clear that it is not required, is being flagged by FB as a violation of their promotions guidelines.

        They have even deleted an entire page for asking a simple question unrelated to a FB giveaway (it was an external giveaway linked in the post) such as “if you won these ___ would you keep them for yourself or share with friends?”. They seem to have “share with your friends” and the like as a red flag. Several bloggers have been warned for this simply posting about external giveaways and using the phrase.

        • Guest

          Which page did they delete? Do you have a reference for this info Bridget?

          • They deleted Carmen’s Coupon Blog’s Facebook page. She first received the below warning on a post that had the wording “If you win these amazing chocolates will you keep them for your self or share with friends..”.

            A few days later, her page was deleted completely.

          • Felicia McQueen

            @GregGoodson:disqus
            My page http://www.facebook.com/ThermoStyle also just rec’d a warning & I hadn’t even launched the comp yet. I merely mentioned it would be starting soon & suggested peop’s share my post with their friends to give them the heads up. And I got a warning with ref to breach of promotional guidelines which doesn’t make sense unless fb have broadened their def of ‘administer’ in section E.3. Do you have an update on this please? Am concerned about the refer-a-friend feature possibly now being in breach of their terms. Would like confirmation you still have the green light. Thanks!

          • Josh @ Rafflecopter

            @felicia_mcqueen:disqus — Can you shoot us an email at support (at) rafflecopter.com and we’d be happy to look into this issue further for you!

      • Felicia McQueen

        My page http://www.facebook.com/ThermoStyle also just rec’d a warning & I hadn’t even launched the comp yet. I merely mentioned it would be starting soon & suggested peop’s share my post with their friends to give them the heads up. And I got a warning with ref to breach of promotional guidelines which doesn’t make sense unless fb have broadened their def of ‘administer’ in section E.3. Do you have an update on this please? Am concerned about the refer-a-friend feature possibly now being in breach of their terms. Would like confirmation you still have the green light. Thanks!

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  • multitestingmommy

    The thing is – I don’t want to contact winners through my personal profile, but you can’t send a message using your Page – so all that leaves for contacting the winner is crossing your fingers you can tag them in the giveaway post – right? Are there any other ways that I am missing?

    • Jennifer

      As far as I can see, there isn’t a way for a page to tag a person even if the person liked the post. The best you can hope for is that the winner commented on the giveaway post, so you can reply to their comment that they won.

      I’m even finding that contacting the winners on Facebook through my personal profile doesn’t work because nobody checks their “other” messages and you don’t get a notification that you have a message in your “other” inbox. Facebook now officially offers a way to bypass that—for .80 euro cents!

  • Jean Oram

    This is very helpful, thank you!

    Question: Can you use Rafflecopter for choosing giveaway winners in a post of your own in a Facebook group or a Facebook event?

    Thanks.

  • Stephanie @ My Wonderful Walls

    We are running our first Facebook Flash Giveaway using your app. Just started today. We are giving away a $25 gift certificate to buy wall decor on our site. Excited to see how it will turn out. Here’s a link if you are interested: https://www.facebook.com/MyWonderfulWalls/posts/587851117937745

  • disqus_5I359yAyPb

    I know this sounds really petty on my part, but it seriously frustrates me to do everything I can to stay within the guidelines and yet see others blatantly disregard the guidelines. I usually excuse it the first time thinking they just don’t know and will send a friendly message that I don’t want to see them get into trouble with Facebook along with a few links to discussions on the latest changes, yet the improper giveaways continue. I have a dear friend who is running one for her business, which also has a page, on her personal timeline and is encouraging her employees to run individual giveaways on their own personal timelines for their services as well. I kindly pointed this out to her and she just completely ignored me and is continuing. Again, I know this seems really petty, but how do you report these types of things? On the personal timeline ones, I can find no way to report other than to categorize it as something it isn’t (such as depicting violence or dismemberment), which I do not want to do.

    • TooMuch

      How about you worry about your page and giveaways and stop being a NARC, if Facebook wants to police it they will, they don’t need your help. We follow the terms and agreements when we run giveaways but what does it matter to us what someone else is doing? It isn’t taking away from our business and FB likes.

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  • JustLearning

    I’m so new to all of this… can I ask people to like the page as entry into the contest?

    • Josh @ Rafflecopter

      Hey — Yup! You definitely can. If you need any further help setting up your first giveaway please don’t hesitate to email us at support (at) rafflecopter dot com

  • Naida Crystal

    If I have two pages, one I do not really use anymore, if I was to have a giveaway on my new business, could I share this on my old one??

  • Gary Martins

    These are all “comment to enter” examples you give at the bottom of the post. Do you have any examples if you have to like a page in order to enter the competition?

  • robyn

    Can someone please explain this step to me, “link to your promotion’s term and conditions directly from your status update”? Where would I write/find the terms and how do I link them? Sorry to sound tech-illiterate…I’m new to FB and Rafflecopter :/ Just want to give away a book copy.

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  • arlene

    Is there somewhere I can copy and paste the facebook rules onto my competition then add my rules to make sure I am completely covered for a free giveaway on a community based page

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  • I’m planning on hosting a giveaway soon, so thanks for the great info! A quick question for you all- how long do you usually run the promotion for? In other words, what is the length of time between the beginning of the promotion and when you choose the winner? I’m having trouble deciding.

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