28 Oct 2025

Tips for Running Attractive, Customer-Generating Facebook Contests

Some say that “what goes around comes back around,” and this could mean many things for people, but in business, it basically means you get back what you give out. Brands often “give” through social media contests and they do most of it on Facebook. The returns are often extra followers, prospects, and brand exposure, which will be beneficial to your brand in the long run!

So, how do you run successful Facebook contests for your brand and nurture your entrants into loyal customers? For starters, you can do these six things:

1. Setting attainable Facebook contest objectives
2. Taking branding into consideration
3. Knowing your target demographic to attract a niche market
4. Determining contest type to release
5. Clarifying rules and eligibility
6. Incentivising entrant actions like sharing, tagging

Now, let’s go through each one of them in detail.

Set attainable contest objectives

While marketers usually want everything (leads, likes, engagements, etc.), overwhelming your team with too many contest goals can lead to a disjointed contest that wouldn’t serve its intended purpose. So it’s better to decide on one or two major goals; these will help determine the contest type that best leads you to accomplish your goals.

Take branding into consideration

Transformation Marketing once said that branding “is everything”, so keep that in mind when creating your contest. Your branding takes care of how you present your brand to an audience; it drives a certain perspective that you want to impart with possible entrants and makes your brand look more put together. When designing the creative aspects of your contest, include your brand’s logo, colours, and typefaces associated with your brand. This helps people easily make the connection and improves brand recognition.

Know your target demographic to attract a niche market

Instead of getting as many people as you can to enter, remember that you have a greater chance of succeeding if you know who you’re designing the contest for. Engaging your target demographic will help improve brand recall and increase the likelihood of them becoming customers in the future. For example, this pet clinic and grooming salon ran a photo contest where they promised free, full grooming services to winners. This spoke to a lot of pet owners and gave the salon more chances of reaching other prospects.

Pets in the City Veterinary Clinic and Grooming Services Photo Contest

Determine contest type to release

Wit backs any good social media competition, so here are some of the most creative contest types that we personally love!

“Fill in the Blank” or “Caption this Photo”

This type of contest inspires creativity from your audience. Let them simply add the last portion of an incomplete sentence and the wittiest entry wins! Aside from their own quips, people are likely to keep engaging by commenting about or liking others’ entries, leading to an increase in brand engagement. When we ran a contest Pho Street, we made sure to encourage entrants to be as creative as they can be while saying exactly why they love the restaurant. As expected, the entrants delivered and the contest ended strong with over 160+ quirky comments and a great number of shares!

Pho Street’s ‘fill in the blank’ contest generated a high level of engagement

“Tag a Friend”

If you intend to acquire a new audience, then “tag a friend” competitions would be a great contest type to explore! With this, you can engage those who know your brand and call the attention of their friends. A whole chicken to feast on with friends is something probably all of us would love. That’s exactly what Lou Yau Singapore used as bait to engage people on their Kampong Chicken giveaway contest! All entrants have to do is like the page, tag five of their friends, and drop into the comment section to say why they deserve the coveted chicken!

Lou Yau Singapore’s Kampong Chicken Giveaway requires participants to tag their friends to win

“Submit a Photo”

A “Submit a Photo” contest targets two birds with one stone. You can get quality content from your audience and also have your products be organically promoted by the delighted entrants! Do remember, however, that while user-generated content (UGC) contests may spread awareness quickly, they may have significantly lower entry rates than contests that merely ask entrants to, say, comment on a post. As a workaround, you must be ready to offer attractive prizes for UGC contests to gain traction. Eggo was able to get user-generated content through a two-part photo contest called The Great Eggo Waffle Off. Participants were asked to share their very own Eggo recipes. This made them eligible for the $5,000 cash prize plus a feature on Eggo’s official Facebook page!

Eggo’s The Great Eggo Waffle Off “submit a photo” contest

“Trivia” or “Count to Win” Contest

Everybody loves a game that doesn’t ask too much from them. Trivia or count to win contests inject that additional amusement that gets your audience going! These types of contests are your go-to buddies when you want to generate lots of engagement and likes in a short amount of time. If you’re new on Facebook, this is a quick way to generate page likes from your brand. Take for example another successful contest run by Pho Street last year; they simply asked participants to enter the number of times they notice Bánh MÌs appear on the video!

Pho Street’s Catch Mi If You Can – Giveaway Contest

Clarify rules and eligibility

Your rules need to clearly state who is eligible to join the Facebook contest, what the entrants must do to enter, the contest period, how you will select the winners, plus the prizes. However, remember not to make it too overwhelming that it intimidates potential entrants. While the key is to create clear rules, having too many steps lower people’s chances of joining. As a general rule of thumb, 3-4 steps should be the limit.

Incentivise entrant actions like sharing, tagging

Facebook has banned “Like-gating” in 2014 (requiring users to like a page in order to enter a competition). The rules are stricter, yes, but there’s a way to outsmart it! According to Post Planner, participants can still like a post, comment, like and comment, or post on the page’s timeline (instead of the individual’s) during a competition. Do inform your participants that the more they adhere to these actions, the larger chances they have of winning!

Poof New York’s Ugly Christmas Sweater Facebook contest

So remember, Facebook contests must…

Do more than alert your audience to deals they could get from your brand. Contests have been one of the most engaging strategies in the social media landscape and it unearths insights from your engaging community, help solidify brand strategies, and get you potential clients!

Having trouble finding the right contest type for your brand? We got you. Give us a call or email us today!