In our past issue, we discovered the methods on how you can get people to like your Facebook business page. In this issue, we will focus on how you can take advantage of promotions, contests, and giveaways to get more individuals.

Utilizing a social media management site solely for promotions, contests and giveaways is a fantastic way to gauge whether these said promotional tactics is working for your business. The site allows anyone to find out the amount of traffic that comes to their page.

The positive aspects of this are two-fold because making the advertisement exclusive will bring in a new set of fans which is always important when trying to create online presence. Contests are quite successful in catching the attention of Facebook users.

Now that you know this, let's move on to how you can implement Facebook marketing and go about making traffic-pulling contests and promos.

The very first thing you'd want to do is to make certain the updates and contest mechanics are only accessible to your Facebook users. Be certain that you don't promote it in your newsletters, social networks or even in the official website. You can however say that the contest is exclusive for Facebook users only. Also, it's important that the mechanics are easy to understand. Complicated mechanics will discourage your fans to join.

As an early notice, contests, incentives and promotions tend to be pricey as the applications needed to develop and run it are also expensive. For example, the application Wildfire has a $5 setup fee and charges $0.99 for each day the campaign runs. In addition to that, Facebook has rigid rules when it comes to running competitions within their network. Generally, a lot of different contests are not even granted. You won't be able to post an official contest in your Facebook wall.

However, you may qualify for an exception. Any business that wants to run contests in Facebook must first purchase at least $10,000 worth of Facebook ads within just three months.

For businesses that are able to use competitions, there are various of business app that help design these. Contests for Fan page is an practical application that was developed by Wildfire and can help newbie in producing contests with photo, video, writing and graphic entries. On top of that, this application is easily customizable. You can alter campaign mechanics, deadlines of contests, the number of votes allowed per person and the level of participation of your network. For less complicated navigation, you can place in a contest widget in your Fan page in order for participants to link straight to a micro site. You can also build your contests and sweepstakes using tools like Vertigo and Strutta.

To really get a lot of participants, make sure you present incentives which people can't refuse. A company named Regus, for example, offered a fully supplied business office for the photo entry which showed the messiest office. See this as a model when coming up with your own contest. More exclusive prizes include dinner with celebrities or a chance to attend a star-studded party.

A profitable contest will generate a lot of leads for the company and will help them communicate with their customers at a very personal level despite the online medium. For some small businesses, projects like these may need a large amount of consideration. However, this can be one of the most efficient strategies to raise business awareness on Facebook.

Be sure to read our next issue of Facebook for Business.We will talk about a very exciting topic: Earning cash on Facebook!

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