Facebook Contest Ideas to Benefit Small Businesses

Facebook contests are becoming good marketing strategies for businesses of any size. You’ve probably heard Facebook success stories from big brands with large budgets.

They often have elaborate landing pages, TV commercials, paid blog posts and celebrity endorsements.

What about the small business that doesn’t have thousands to spend? This list is for you.

1.  Tie your contest into current events
Clothing company PLNDR gave a unique twist to the NCAA. Instead of basketball teams facing off against each other, they had brands submit T-shirt designs and let them battle on Facebook.

The designer with the most “likes” moved to the next round. As a result, PLNDR's Facebook page grew 800 percent—look at their chart on this blog post.

TimetoPlayMag.com tied their contest into a holiday with a virtual Easter Egg hunt. They hid five Easter eggs on their website each day, for a total of 15 days.

The first player to find an egg and click on it won a $20 Toys"R"Us gift card. All of the clues and hints to find the eggs were posted on Facebook—smart way to drive people to your site.

2.  Run a photo contest
During the summer, pizza company Fresh Brothers runs contests using their mascot, the Slice (a giant slice of pizza).

They tell fans where and when Slice will be at events, and if they snap a picture with the Slice and post it, they get a gift certificate as a thank you.

Wine website Snooth.com created a Facebook landing page on their Fan page using the Wildfire app. Facebook guidelines say brands should run contests like this through an app.

To promote one of the Australian brand wines, they asked people to submit pictures of people showing their Australian pride.

Fans posted pictures of themselves enjoying the wine and using the Australian recipes from their website.

People voted on the photos, driving new exposure, and as a result, traffic continued even after the contest ended.

3.  Play simple guessing games with your fans
PR firm Sammis & Ochoa runs promotions for two restaurants in Texas. The contests run every Friday at 4 p.m. CDT, which gives them a chance to prep and tell others.

“When we run late, we hear about it,” says CEO Mario Ochoa.

Other game examples:

• A Word Jumble of a local landmark.
• Post a local picture for people to guess where it was taken.
• Guess how many almonds are in the cup.
• Ask a weekly question then randomly choose a fan to reward with a prize.

4.  Ask fans to share their best tips
Hiatus Spa is running a “Be Green and Be Good; Earth Month 2011” Contest. They asked fans to share tips on how to use less resources through this Web page.

The tip with the most unique comments and "likes" wins three Hiatus Spa services. “The great thing is that this has really been fun and people are sharing wonderful, useful information,” said Jordan Harbinger who helped run the contest.

5.  Collect your fan’s favorite quotes
This is simple and can be applied to just about any business. Laura Ann Allahverdi is a Personal Life Coach who asked her fans to submit their favourite quotes.

The person who got the most likes on their quote got a free session with Laura. She loved how people filled her Wall with inspirational posts and fans got their friends involved in the contest, increasing her exposure to new networks.

6.  Name the local celebrity game
Maia Yogurt said one of their most successful contests was a "local celebrity ID" game. They posted a picture of a local "celebrity", they chose a popular and well-known independent grocery store owner so it helped garner some good will with the people they hoped to contact, and asked their Facebook fans to guess the person’s name to win a free MAIA T-shirt.

7.  Reward “likes”
Again, you must be careful how you do this to fall within Facebook guidelines, but there are many ways to reward people for becoming fans.

Snack and Munch ships boxes of snacks to hungry office workers and college students so they’re ready for the munchies.

To enter their contest, they ask people to “like” their page. They choose a weekly winner who gets a free box of 24 snacks. In the process, they get great feedback about their product.

The company has some solid advice about expectations: “You have to be patient because the success doesn’t come overnight, it takes time and persistent. Persistence is the key, you have to keep on moving forward and not stop.”

LinkedIn Marketing: 7 Tips for the Small Business

LinkedIn has over 135 million members, the majority of whom are professionals, in 200 countries.

For businesses looking to connect with particular industries or specific business demographics, its powerful search facilities and networking opportunities make the most out of a limited marketing budget.

The following LinkedIn tips will help you focus on the network’s potential;

1. Listen to your market
LinkedIn Groups can essentially provide you with free market research if you spend time browsing in the right places.

Once you have identified your target market, you can search for the groups in which people are discussing the sorts of problems or challenges they are facing, or learn more about how they would like to do business.

2. Maximize your profile
Make the most of your company profile by filling in all the sections, including the keywords, which will help others find you.

Be sure to keep all links current and customize what you can. For instance, you can change the URL to be your company name rather than a string of numbers and letters.

You can also upgrade your account to allow you to do more, such as using the InMail service to contact members, get introductions to companies and see more information on potential contacts.

3. Make the most of what you already have
You can use LinkedIn apps to link your blog, portfolio and other content directly into your LinkedIn feed.

You can also upload YouTube videos, SlideShare presentations and other media. Or you can set your Twitter or Facebook updates to post automatically to LinkedIn.

If you do this, however, beware of how you would like your business to be portrayed; frivolous Facebook or Twitter remarks may seem out of place on LinkedIn.

4. Use LinkedIn Ads
LinkedIn Ads can offer a low-cost alternative to traditional advertising, with a potentially wider and more targeted reach, including CEOs or senior decision makers. Because of the detail in LinkedIn accounts, LinkedIn Ads can specifically target your demographic by industry, geographic location, seniority, age or LinkedIn Group.

5. LinkedIn recommendations
One of the best ways to build your business’s reputation on LinkedIn is to ask for recommendations from customers, clients or business partners.

Recommendations from others will show up in their profile, meaning that their own network will see it, which gives you a much wider reach than your own network.

You can also use LinkedIn’s Recommendation Ads to have your recommendations placed strategically on your customers’ profiles.

6. Make the most of LinkedIn’s search feature
LinkedIn has detailed search criteria in their Advanced Search, which can help you target your efforts and reach contacts or other networking opportunities in a more focused way.

In addition to keywords, names, location and company, you can also search industries, groups, seniority, experience, function, company size and several other categories.

7. Manage your goals
It is important to realize that, as with any social network, LinkedIn is a tool for connecting but it is only as good as the way you use it.

You can maximize your effort by having clear goals of what you want to achieve, whether it is numbers of client connections, hits to your website, recommendation targets or an increased exposure with a particular demographic.

Keeping your goals in mind can help you focus on where to concentrate your resources and create a more successful outcome.

Gary Lauder says: Take Turns!

Gary Lauder is the managing partner of Lauder Partners, a VC firm, and the co-creator of the Socrates Society at the Aspen Institute. Full bio and more links

Compared to traffic signals that force you to stop your car and then bring it back up to speed again, traffic controls like roundabouts save energy and money, and reduce pollution.

The trouble is that roundabouts don't work in all situations. So what can you do instead? In this shorter-than-normal TED talk, Gary Lauder presents a possible solution.

8 Questions that will increas your blog traffic

8 questions to ask yourself to help identify what is working (or what might work) with your readers and niche:

• What topics generate most comments on your blog?
• What topics generate most comments on other blogs in your niche?
• What other sites do your readers visit a lot? What activities are they doing there?
• What features are readers asking for?
• What was your biggest traffic day – what brought it about?
• Which of your posts seem to get Retweeted most on Twitter and passed around most on other social media sites?
• Which of your posts are getting linked to most from other blogs/sites?
• What other sites send you most traffic? How can you build relationships with these sites?

This list could go on and on. It is all about looking for points of life on your site (even small ones) where there’s some kind of energy or positive outcome happening and then repeating them in a slightly different and unique way.

You are looking for opportunities to build on and improve on what you did previously. Good luck!