Did you know that as of December 31, 2018, there was an average of 1.52 billion daily active users on Facebook and 2.32 billion monthly active users on the platform?
Facebook still attracts the lion’s share of social media visitors. Most likely, your target audience is there. And a great way to reach and engage this audience is through a Facebook photo contest.
Read below for a walkthrough of the essentials of getting started with creating a photo contest on Facebook, including how to use Woobox to build and customize your photo contest promotions.
Let’s get started!
The Essentials of Creating a Photo Contest on Facebook
As with any social media marketing campaign or promotion, and especially on Facebook, there are some essentials you need to cover before launching your contest.
Below, you can read an outline of those foundational elements and considerations to help get you started with contest planning.
Familiarize Yourself with Facebook’s Contest Rules
Rules … we know, such a buzzkill. However, you’ll want to start your contest on the right foot.
As of March 2019, Facebook’s rules for running a promotion require you to do the following:
- Provide a copy of or link to the official rules and information on terms and eligibility requirements
- Be compliant with applicable (state, provincial, and/or federal) rules and regulations governing contests and prizes
- Include a complete release of Facebook by each entrant or participant
- Acknowledge that the promotion is in no way sponsored, endorsed, administered by, or associated with Facebook
- NOT require the use of Personal Timelines and friend connections to administer promotions. In other words, you can’t ask people to:
- “share on your Timeline to enter”
- “share on your friend’s Timeline to get additional entries”
- “tag your friends in this post to enter
Determine how the photo contest aligns with and supports your goals.
Running a photo contest for the sake of running a contest may be fun, but does it move the needle on your business and marketing goals? Maybe. Maybe not.
What do you want to accomplish with a contest? If lead generation is what you’re after, there are easier, less time-intensive options — like a giveaway. If you’re after user-generated content (UGC) and buzz, then a photo contest is perfect.
What do you want to happen as a result of your photo contest?
What’s the best approach to get user-generated content from your audience?
There are industries and niches where a user-generated photo contest is a no brainer — like fashion, beauty, design. Ask your fans to upload their best selfie or outfit, and you’re done!
But what about other industries? You need to get a little more creative. Maybe a photo of how your customers spend the time or money they save thanks to your product or service?
Select a prize that resonates with your audience.
When you do a photo contest, you’re asking dedicated fans to put in some effort. Your prize should make it worth their time to participate.
Choose software that helps you manage the contest like a pro.
Not all Facebook photo contest software is created equal. Find a user-friendly option that helps you comply with all of Facebook’s regulations. (Psst — we’re talking about Woobox here!)
How Do You Create (and Embed) a Facebook Photo Contest?
Setting up your Facebook photo contest is a breeze. Let’s walk through the steps together, shall we?
First, visit the Campaigns page in your Woobox account and click on the Landing Pages to find the UGC Contest template.
You can select a custom template or start from scratch with a blank template.
Take a little time to make your promotion look gorgeous. (We’ll cover more details on this in the next section.)
Then, embed on your Facebook page as a tab.
Important note: While you can use the Facebook Tab option as your sole entry path to your UGC photo contest, keep in mind that mobile users won’t see your contest because Facebook doesn’t support mobile access to page tabs.
If you have a lot of fans who use mobile to engage with your page, you may want to embed the contest on a page on your website for those participants, or just make sure to share the mobile-friendly woobox.com/xxxxxx campaign URL in a post so mobile users can access the campaign outside of the tab.
What’s another option to encourage participation by both computer users and mobile users? Allow users to enter the contest by making a public post on your Facebook page’s wall, with the hashtag(s) of your choosing.
Best Ways to Make Photo Contests Look Great
Woobox offers easy-to-use, fantastic customization features to help you make your photo contest tab or embedded form look fabulous.
Out of the gate, you have terrific starter templates to help you jump-start your contest efforts. Bonus: they’re fully editable! You can make use of Woobox’s design tools to adjust placement, colors, fonts, upload images, and more.
What else can you edit on your contest entry page/Facebook tab?
- Page fonts
- Form input fonts
- Backgrounds (images and colors)
- Dividers and additional sections
- Campaign button styles
- And more
You can even get fancy with your own advanced javascript, HTML, and CSS.
How to Customize Your Photo Contest Forms
With all these options for giving your entry page a little swagger, you might be wondering, “but what about the form itself?”
Woobox forms allow you to:
- Add one or more social media follow and share options.
- Require a Facebook profile to enter.
- Choose any form field type, even adding editable form HTML and file upload fields.
You can essentially collect as much information as you need, but don’t over-complicate things. The more fields you require, the less likely someone will participate.
Add Contest Voting Options
Want to add a little extra buzz potential to your Facebook photo contest? Consider adding a voting component. Get your community involved in voting for their favorite entries. With Woobox, it’s easy to add this functionality to your contest.
With a Woobox UGC Contest, voters can vote once per submission. They can vote for as many submissions as they like, but they can only vote once per submission. You have the option to make that one vote be per day, or once overall.
Things to consider when you add voting to your Facebook photo contest:
Consider providing an additional way to win. If you want to keep the momentum going with your contest when it comes to late entrants, consider a combination of ways to win. Maybe one entry wins based on popular vote while another wins based on selection by a panel of judges.
If you do use a panel of judges to pick a winner, be sure to list the criteria that those judges will consider when evaluating photo entries.
Take steps to limit cheating and voter fraud. Enable data collection from voters and restrict voting to email address or email address per day to monitor and prevent fraudulent votes.
Alternatively, you can restrict voting to “Facebook user” or “Facebook user per day.” With the voting by Facebook user account, you will be able to verify that each vote is cast by an individual Facebook user account, and you will still get the IP Addresses for each vote cast in the Vote Export file.
Regardless of which option you choose, you can also review the Voter Export file for votes where the Bad IP column is filled in. The information here tells you if the vote came from a known fraudulent server, and weeds out potentially fraudulent votes.
Wrapping Up
As you begin planning your next (or first!) Facebook photo contest, be sure to keep the points mentioned above in mind.
Need the TL;DR version of what we covered? No problem.
How to Create a Photo Contest on Facebook:
- Familiarize yourself with the essentials for launching a successful Facebook photo contest.
- Know Facebook’s rules
- Plan around your business goals
- Select the right theme/approach for your audience
- Pick a prize that resonates with your audience
- Choose software like Woobox that helps you easily manage your contest
- Set up your contest and embed it on Facebook to make it easy for your community to participate. Alternatively, create a landing page on your website or allow posting to your page (coupled with a hashtag) as a means of entry.
- Use Woobox’s easy-to-use design features to make your contest entry page/tab look fabulous.
- Customize fields to capture the information you want to receive.
- Add a voting component for more buzz and fun.
Contact Woobox Support
Have questions about setting up your UGC photo or video contest on Facebook using Woobox? The Woobox Support staff are happy to provide any help or answer any questions you might have by phone or email. Reach out from 8 am — 5 pm (PST) Monday through Friday at 1-360-450-5200 or support@woobox.com.