New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Introducing RafflePress's new leave-a-review giveaway actions. Boost customer engagement and build trust effortlessly by incentivizing reviews in WordPress.
New Update: Boost Social Proof with Reviews & Automation
Stacey Corrin
Stacey Corrin
John Turner
John Turner
Do you want to run a like and share contest on Facebook?
Like and share contests incentivize fans to like your Facebook post and share it with friends for entries into a prize draw. It’s a quick and easy way to grow your page, raise brand awareness, and keep your audience engaged.
However, Facebook has firm guidelines for like and share contests, so it’s important to follow them to avoid having your content removed.
With that in mind, we’ll show you how to do a like and share contest on Facebook that complies with the rules and helps your business grow.
In This Guide
Now that you know what a like and share contest is, let’s look at how to create one for Facebook.
Before building your contest, you should figure out why you want to run one in the first place. Setting goals helps you accurately measure your results and see if your contest was successful.
So think about what you want to achieve with a Facebook contest.
For example, it could be to…
Your contest goal should align with the marketing objectives of your business. That way, running a successful like and share contest on Facebook will be easier.
Now that you know your contest goals, it’s time to choose a prize to encourage your fans to enter. If you don’t offer a desirable prize, people won’t make an effort to take part, and it’ll result in a giveaway with poor results.
For instance, imagine you’re a travel brand offering a $20 Amazon gift card as a prize. It might get a little interest from people wanting a freebie. But when the contest ends, you probably won’t hear from them again.
Related: What Happened to Amazon Giveaways? (+ How to Still Run Them)
On the other hand, if you offer a free vacation or a massive discount on their next holiday, you’ll see tons of entries and engagement.
That’s because you’re offering something your audience wants. It speaks to their needs and desires while being super-relevant to your brand. A prize like that will ensure the engagement continues long after your contest ends.
For even more contest prize ideas, take a look at this guide.
With your goals and prize in place, turn your attention toward the rules for your contest. The rules tell people everything they need to know to enter for a chance to win your grand prize.
Since you’re running a follow, like, and share contest, your rules should explain how to like your page and share the giveaway.
Remember, Facebook doesn’t allow you to require users to share your contest on their personal or friends’ timelines. Plus, requiring users to like your page is another grey area, so it’s worth staying away from. We’ll go into your contest entry methods in more detail in the next step.
You check out the main Facebook giveaway rules here.
Other details you should add to your contest rules include:
After planning your goals, choosing a prize, and writing your rules, it’s time to start building your Facebook like and share contest.
The easiest way to run a compliant like and share contest on Facebook is with RafflePress, the best WordPress giveaway plugin.
RafflePress makes it easy to run any type of online contest, including contests for Facebook. It has everything you need to meet your giveaway goals, whether to grow your Facebook page, increase website traffic, or grow your email list.
Here’s a step-by-step guide for running a like and share contest on Facebook with RafflePress.
First, click here to get started with RafflePress. Then once you’ve downloaded the plugin, follow these instructions to install and activate a WordPress plugin.
After installing RafflePress, navigate to your WordPress dashboard. From there, hover your mouse over the RafflePress icon and click Add New to create a new giveaway.
After clicking Add New, you’ll see a page where you can give your contest a name and pick a giveaway template.
RafflePress has a selection of pre-made giveaway templates designed to help you get started quickly. Clicking one will launch a contest populated with entry methods that meet your contest goals.
For example, if you want more newsletter subscribers, you can choose the Grow Your Email list template to add the “Join a Newsletter” giveaway action automatically.
We’ll choose the Grow Your Facebook Page template for this tutorial, which populates the giveaway widget with the “Visit us on Facebook” and “Visit Facebook Post / Video” actions.
So go ahead and hover over the Grow Your Facebook Page giveaway template and click Use This Template.
After choosing your template, you’ll see the RafflePress giveaway builder, where you can enter the details for your prize.
To do that, click the pencil icon under the Giveaway Prize Details heading and enter a heading and description. Then you can add an image of the prize by clicking the Select Image button.
When you’re happy with your prize details, click the Done Editing button.
Now navigate to the Start and End Time section to choose a start and end date and time. You can also select a specific time zone for your contest.
Click the Save button to preserve your changes.
The next step is to click the Actions tab. This takes you to a screen with several actions people can take to enter your contest.
The entry methods are grouped by goal, such as:
And you can use multiple actions to offer bonus entries to participants.
To run a like and share contest on Facebook, you can start with the Visit us on Facebook action for 1 contest entry. Then you can use the View Facebook Post / Video action for a 2nd contest entry. To encourage your contest’s viral sharing, you can use the Refer a Friend action for a 3rd contest entry.
You can also include bonus Facebook entry actions for users to Like your Facebook page and share your giveaway post on Facebook.
If you like, you can add further actions to your contest widget. Simply click the action to add it to the builder automatically.
Clicking any action in your widget opens up the entry options to define several settings. The settings include how many entries the action is worth, if it’s mandatory, a field for your Facebook URL, and if users can perform the action daily.
Once you’ve configured the settings for each action, click the Save button.
The next step is to design the look of your contest by clicking the Design tab. Here you can choose from 2 different layout settings and several fonts and button colors.
If you’re creating a standalone landing page for your giveaway, you can select a color for the page background or upload a background image.
When you’re happy with how everything looks, click Save and move on to the next step.
Now click the Settings tab to see options for your Giveaway Rules, General Settings, Email Verification, Success Tracking, and more.
The most important of these settings is the Giveaway Rules. With RafflePress’s Giveaway Rules Generator, you can get a head start on creating your contest rules.
Clicking the Generate Rules button reveals an overlay where you can enter your sponsor’s name, email, address, suitable locations, etc. Then it’s merely a case of clicking Generate Rules to add your contest requirements to the giveaway builder.
You can check out our documentation for details on all the RafflePress settings.
Remember to click Save when you’ve configured your settings.
Now it’s time to publish your contest. RafflePress makes this easy by offering 3 different ways to publish your giveaway, including:
The landing page option is the easiest and most effective way to publish your giveaway. It creates a standalone page on your website just for your contest. And because there are no distractions on the page, there’s nothing to prevent participants from entering right away.
So go ahead and choose the Giveaway Landing Page option.
From there, click the ‘Click here’ link to navigate to the Page Permalink, settings as shown below:
Then enter a short slug. For instance, if we were to run a contest on RafflePress and chose a slug of facebook-contest, our landing page would have this final URL: rafflepress.com/facebook-contest.
After, you can click the View button to see what your giveaway landing page looks like.
With your landing page setup, you need to post your like and share contest on Facebook. This step is super-easy. All you need to do is create a new Facebook post and paste the URL for your giveaway landing page with instructions for people to click the link to enter.
Ensure you include an enticing description and image in your Facebook post to grab people’s attention. It’s also a good idea to include a summary of your Facebook promotion guidelines and a disclosure that the contest isn’t sponsored by or affiliated with Facebook.
This post from Brain Health Magazine is an excellent example of sharing all contest details in a way that generates excitement.
After launching your contest, you can’t sit and wait for people to enter. You need to start promoting your giveaway from day 1 to spread the word and increase participation.
One of the easiest ways to promote your contest is to share it on social media channels like Instagram, Pinterest, and Twitter and ask people to tag a friend in the comments. You can also include relevant giveaway hashtags to boost your posts’ visibility.
Other ways you can promote your contest include:
Running Facebook Ads for your contest can increase engagement. Paid advertisements offer an effective way to reach a wider, more targeted audience beyond your typical followers.
Here’s how you can go about it:
You can also check out these proven contest promotion ideas for more inspiration.
When your contest is over, you’ll need to choose a winner. This is usually pretty difficult with normal like and share Facebook contests because you’d have to look up each entry manually.
This isn’t a problem when using RafflePress. Since everyone entered your contest through the giveaway widget, each participant is stored in the contest management dashboard, so they’re easy to find.
Picking a winner is even easier. Simply use the built-in random winner picker to randomly select the winner of your contest.
Here’s how it works.
First, navigate to RafflePress » Giveaways and click the Needs Winners link.
From there, you’ll see a list of everyone who entered and how many entries they each have. To choose a winner randomly, click the Pick Winner button, enter your settings, and click Choose Winners Now.
The winner is highlighted instantly at the tip of the list of participants. Then it’s simply a case of clicking to email them with the good news.
When your Facebook like and share contest is over, it’s a good idea to announce the winner to everyone who took part. Then you can thank everyone for entering and invite them to join in with your next giveaway.
You can follow up with participants by creating an announcement post on social media and tagging the winner. Alternatively, you can email participants expressing your thanks and offering them a discount code or coupon.
Taking this step after your giveaway helps you strengthen your relationship with your new audience, which is an excellent move toward turning them into paying customers.
There’s 1 more thing you should do before claiming that your contest was a success. And that is to look at the data and analyze your results.
The easiest way to get the data you need for your giveaway is to use MonsterInsights, the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.
MonsterInsights makes it easy to track visits to your contest landing page, referral traffic, website activity, etc. You can view all the data inside your WordPress dashboard, which means you won’t have to leave your site to get the information you need.
By looking through the analytics gathered with MonsterInsights, you can see which promotion strategies drove the most traffic to your giveaway landing page and where it came from. You can then use that information to improve and make your next contest an even greater success.
While like and share contests are a popular option, they aren’t the only way to engage your Facebook audience and reach new followers. Here are a few alternative contest ideas to consider:
These are just a few ideas to get you started. When choosing a contest format, consider your goals and target audience. The best contest is engaging, relevant, and appeals to your ideal customers.
We hope this article helped you learn how to do a like and share contest on Facebook.
With RafflePress, creating a contest is a breeze, and you won’t have to worry about not complying with the Facebook promotion guidelines. Instead, you have a successful like-and-share contest that drives many likes, engagement, and traffic to grow your business.
Get started with RafflePress here.
You might also find the following giveaway guides helpful:
Thanks for reading, and if you liked this article, don’t forget to follow us on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for more great tips to grow your business.
Disclosure: Our content is reader-supported. This means if you click on some of our links, then we may earn a commission. We only recommend products that we believe will add value to our readers.
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How do I run a giveaway, but choose the winner live and randomly generated for everyone to see? as our business model requires full transparency with our customers – we run a raffle site where user’s are assigned randomly generated ticket numbers.
Hi Zak,
If you’d like to randomly draw a winner for everyone to see, you can record your screen when you run RafflePress’s random winner picker. The winner is chosen randomly from all entries in a transparent and fair way. You can learn more about how it works here.
I have used the rafflepress plugin but it keeps loading when I add the giveaway on the page…can anyone let me know the exact issue?
Thanks for your comment. It would be best if you send a support ticket to us here, that way we can pin down exactly what’s going wrong.
So this isn’t really a “Like and Share” contest is it? More of a “visit us/view post” contest, otherwise we run the risk of getting our page banned? Is this correct?
Hi Conner. Yes, that’s correct. We include the like and share actions in RafflePress so you can decide for yourself if it’s worth the risk.
is it free or paid?
Hi Rafael. RafflePress has both a free and paid version. You can find the free version here.