How to Run a Photo Contest on Facebook (the Easiest Way)

Photo contests sound simple until you realize there’s a moderation queue, a rules page, and Facebook policies to navigate.

I like them because they do more than a standard giveaway. When people share photos with your product, you get authentic content that builds trust and keeps paying off in future campaigns.

In this guide, I’ll show you how to set up a Facebook photo contest step by step using RafflePress, a WordPress giveaway plugin built for exactly this.

Quick steps to run a photo contest on Facebook:

• 1. Set Goals for Your Contest
• 2. Choose a Theme for Your Photo Contest
• 3. Pick a Great Contest Prize
• 4. Define Your Facebook Photo Contest Rules
• 5. Create Your Facebook Photo Contest with RafflePress
• 6. Publish Your Photo Contest on Facebook
• 7. Promote Your Contest
• 8. Pick a Winner for Your Contest
• 9. Follow Up and Measure Your Results

What Are the Rules for Running a Photo Contest on Facebook?

Before I dive into the how-to’s, you need to understand Facebook’s rules for contests and promotions. That way, you can start your giveaway off on the right foot.

Here’s a look at what you need to keep in mind for your photo contest rules:

• Include a link to Facebook’s official contest rules and who can enter.
• Ensure you’re compliant with local rules and regulations on contests and prizes.
• Include a complete Facebook release for each participant.
• State your competition is not endorsed by Facebook.
• Don’t make it a requirement for people to share your contest on their personal timelines or tag their friends to enter.

How Do You Run a Photo Contest on Facebook?

As I mentioned earlier, photo contests are ideal for gathering user-generated content from your fans. With permission from participants, you can use that content in future messaging about your brand.

Couple that with the marketing power of Facebook, and you’ve got the perfect recipe for a viral giveaway that drives potential customers to your website.

But before you run a photo contest on Facebook, it’s essential to choose the right goals, which I’ll cover next.

1. Set Goals for Your Contest

Your promotion goals should reflect what you want to achieve for your business. Then, you can craft the perfect Facebook giveaway to turn those goals into tangible outcomes.

According to Dr. Edwin Locke, an expert in goal-setting theory, setting clear and challenging goals can significantly impact your success. His research shows that:

1. Challenging goals drive better results than easy ones.
2. Clear and specific goals yield better outcomes than vague ones like “do your best.”
3. Incentives like rewards and time limits work best when they align with your specific goals.

Using SMART goals — Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound — helps you stay focused and track your progress.

So, think about why you want to run a photo contest on Facebook. What will promoting your business and gathering content from fans on your Facebook page mean in the long term?

Examples of Measurable Goals:

• Increase Facebook Followers: Aim to boost your follower count by a specific percentage or number. Track the increase in followers using Facebook Insights.
• Drive Website Traffic: Set a goal to increase traffic to your website. Use tools like Google Analytics to monitor referral traffic from your Facebook contest posts.
• Generate User-Generated Content: Collect a set number of user-generated photos for future marketing campaigns. Create a repository to manage and track the content submissions.
• Enhance Engagement: Measure engagement through likes, shares, and comments on your contest posts. Use Facebook Insights to track these metrics.
• Grow Email Subscribers: Encourage participants to sign up for your newsletter as part of the entry process. Track growth in your email list through your email marketing platform.

How Long Should You Run a Facebook Photo Contest?

Timing plays a crucial role in the success of your contest. The sweet spot is 1-2 weeks which is long enough for shares to compound and build momentum, but short enough that people don’t assume they have plenty of time and never enter.

Running it around holidays or events can increase participation due to the extra activity on social media during these periods. Offering smaller daily prizes leading up to a grand prize at the end can keep users engaged throughout.

2. Choose a Theme for Your Photo Contest

Successful photo contests tend to have a theme to make it more exciting for people to enter. The theme could be something simple and relevant to your brand or something more complex that requires extra effort.

Here are some specific examples of themes and how they align with different types of businesses:

• Seasonal Events: Align your contest with holidays like Mother’s Day, Halloween, or Thanksgiving to leverage the festive spirit.
• Product-Focused: If you sell kitchen gadgets, ask participants to submit their best cooking photos using your products.
• Community Engagement: A local business could run a contest asking for photos of favorite local landmarks or community events.
• Lifestyle Themes: For a fitness brand, themes could include before-and-after transformation photos or participants showcasing their favorite workout spots.

By selecting a theme that resonates with your target audience and aligns with your brand, you can increase participation and the overall success of your contest.

In the Facebook photo contest example below, participants were asked to share their favorite local features for inclusion on the hotel’s postcard. The winning submission could win a 3-course dinner for 2.

This leads us nicely to the topic of choosing a prize for your contest.

3. Pick a Great Contest Prize

Choosing the right contest prize is essential for attracting the right audience and maximizing participation. Your prize should be relevant to your business to ensure that entrants are genuinely interested in what you offer.

For example, if you own a fitness brand, offering a year-long gym membership or a bundle of your top-selling fitness products can attract fitness enthusiasts who are more likely to become long-term customers.

Additionally, consider the value of the prize relative to the effort required to enter. A highly valuable prize can justify more complex entry requirements, while a smaller prize might suit simpler entry methods.

The goal is to attract participants who are likely to engage with your brand beyond the contest. Here are some contest prize ideas for more inspiration.

4. Define Your Facebook Photo Contest Rules

Your next task is to define your Facebook photo contest rules. These will tell your fans who can enter and what actions they should take to participate.

Your rules should also include the following details:

• How old should people be to enter? Do they need to be over a certain age?
• Whether your contest is limited to a particular country or is international.
• How someone can enter your giveaway, and how often they can enter.
• The way you’ll choose a winner: random draw, Facebook voting contest, or a panel of judges.

Include a statement saying your contest isn’t sponsored by Facebook, as mentioned in the rules section above.

You can easily create a set of rules with RafflePress’s contest rules template. Just enter some information about your Facebook photo contest rules, and it will automatically create your guidelines.

How to Prevent Cheating in Your Facebook Photo Contest

Fraud is a real concern for contests with a valuable prize. Multiple entries from the same person skew results and frustrate genuine participants.

RafflePress has built-in tools to address this. You can set entry limits per person, and it tracks IP addresses to flag submissions from the same device. I also recommend moderating photo submissions before they go live, so you control entry quality and prevent inappropriate content from appearing.

For high-value prizes, avoid vote-only winner selection. A hybrid approach, where a panel reviews the top-voted entries and picks the winner, is far harder to game.

With your Facebook photo contest rules template in place, you’re ready to create your photo contest.

5. Set Up Your Facebook Photo Contest with RafflePress

While you can run your giveaway directly on Facebook, doing so gives you less control over your campaign and makes it harder to manage. Facebook’s platform can make it difficult to track entries and moderate submissions. Plus, its algorithms might limit the visibility of your contest posts.

That’s why using RafflePress is a smart choice. It’s a WordPress giveaway plugin that’s also the best photo contest app for Facebook, giving you a dedicated entry page, built-in fraud protection, and full control over submissions.

Creating and running a photo contest with RafflePress is straightforward. It offers everything you need to achieve your giveaway goals, such as growing your email list, driving traffic to your website, and increasing your Facebook followers.

With the built-in Facebook giveaway template, you can get up and running in just a few clicks.

It automatically adds a giveaway action to view your Facebook page, which helps you get more fans.

Additionally, it includes an action to view a Facebook post or video. When you paste a post URL in the action settings, RafflePress will embed it directly inside the widget, allowing users to complete the action without leaving your website.

RafflePress contest pages are also fully mobile-responsive. With a large portion of Facebook users browsing on their phones, this matters — a contest that breaks on mobile loses entries before participants even start.

You can learn how to run a Giveaway on Facebook with RafflePress here. Then, follow these easy steps to create a photo contest using the Submit a Photo entry method included with RafflePress’s suite of viral social media actions.

Both tutorials will teach you how to publish your contest on your WordPress website as either a post or a distraction-free giveaway landing page.

When you’re finished setting up your contest on your website, come back here to learn how to publish it on your Facebook page.

6. Publish Your Photo Contest on Facebook

You can publish your RafflePress photo contest on Facebook in 2 ways:

1. Share the link to your contest landing page in a new post on Facebook.
2. Post the URL to your contest blog post in a new Facebook post.

Publishing your contest on your website and sharing the link does two things at once. You’re engaging your Facebook audience with new content, and you’re sending traffic to your business website, which increases your chances of turning visitors into customers.

If you only create a Facebook post for your contest, you’d miss out on powerful entry methods that could make your contest go viral. It also gets confusing for participants since you’d have a lot of information crammed into a single post.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Because submissions are in the post comments, it’s hard to track who entered.

But if you look at this Facebook photo contest example where the user created their contest with RafflePress, it’s easy for fans to see that they need to click the link to enter.

7. Promote Your Contest

Once your Facebook photo contest is ready to roll, the next step is to get the word out. A smart, multi-channel approach will ensure your contest captures attention and sparks participation.

Begin with your home base: your Facebook page. Regular, engaging posts about your contest keep the excitement alive and encourage shares, extending your reach organically.

For an extra visibility boost, use Facebook ads. Targeted advertising helps you reach a broader, yet specific, audience, increasing the likelihood of attracting interested participants.

Don’t stop at Facebook. Promote across every channel you have:

• Email Newsletters: Alert your email subscribers with a compelling call to action.
• Your Website: Use banners or pop-ups to catch the eye of your site visitors.
• Other Social Platforms: Share on Twitter, Instagram photo contests use the same approach, and LinkedIn can reach a different audience.
• In-Store Promotion: If applicable, use offline methods like flyers or posters to inform customers.

For more ideas, please see these proven contest promotion ideas.

How do I prevent people from entering my photo contest multiple times?

With RafflePress, you can limit the number of entries per person. It also tracks IP addresses to flag submissions from the same device.

8. Pick a Winner for Your Contest

Picking a winner for your contest depends on the type of photo contest you created. If it’s a simple contest, chances are you can choose a winner at random.

But if your contest requires more effort for Facebook users to enter, you’ll either need to ask your fans to vote for the best entry or have a panel of judges decide.

For help with how to pick a winner for your giveaway, see this tutorial.

9. Follow Up and Measure Your Results

After your contest ends and you’ve picked a winner, there’s still work to do. The follow-up phase is where you protect your investment and build momentum for the next contest.

Here are the key steps to take after your contest closes:

• Announce the winner publicly. Share the winning photo on Facebook and other social media. Congratulate the winner by name and tag them if possible.
• Thank everyone who entered. A brief thank-you post keeps goodwill alive and makes participants want to join your next contest.
• Use the photos people submitted — with permission. Show the best entries on your website or social media, but always get written consent before using someone’s photo in your marketing. A simple message asking permission is enough, but don’t skip it.
• Keep people engaged. Follow up through email or social media, offer small prizes or discounts to non-winners, and share a behind-the-scenes look at how you selected the winner.
• Ask for feedback. Find out what people thought about your contest so you can improve the next one.
• Start planning your next contest. Use what you learned — what drove entries, what didn’t — to make the next one more effective.

Measuring Your Contest Results

Analyzing your results tells you how successful your contest was and what to improve next time. The easiest way to track and measure results is with MonsterInsights, the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

MonsterInsights makes it easy to track visits to your giveaway page from inside your WordPress dashboard. You can see referral traffic, eCommerce data, and real-time stats, without leaving your site.

Facebook Photo Contest FAQ

How long should a Facebook photo contest run?

Run your Facebook photo contest for 1-2 weeks. That’s long enough for entries to build through shares and word-of-mouth, but short enough to maintain urgency. Longer than two weeks and momentum usually drops, because participants assume they have plenty of time and never get around to entering.

Can you run a photo contest directly on Facebook without an app?

You can, but it’s harder to manage than it sounds. Entries come in through post comments, making them difficult to track and moderate. Facebook’s algorithm may also limit how many people see your contest post. Using a dedicated photo contest app for Facebook like RafflePress gives you a proper entry page, built-in fraud protection, and a clear submission process that’s easy for participants to follow.

How do you prevent cheating in a Facebook photo contest?

Use a contest tool with entry limits and IP tracking, like RafflePress, to stop the same person from entering multiple times. Moderate photo submissions before they go live so you can review each entry. For high-value prizes, avoid vote-only selection — it’s easy to game with shared links. A hybrid approach where a panel reviews top-voted entries reduces manipulation.

How do you announce the winner of a Facebook photo contest?

Post a winner announcement on your Facebook page that includes the winning photo, the winner’s name (with their permission), and a thank-you to everyone who entered. Tag the winner if possible so they see the notification. Share the announcement across your other channels too — email and Instagram are especially effective for extending the reach of the reveal.

You now have a step-by-step plan for running a photo contest that gets entries, stays compliant with Facebook’s rules, and turns participants into brand advocates. The difference between a contest that builds your audience and one that fizzles out is almost always in the setup and you’ve covered it all here.

RafflePress handles the entry collection, fraud protection, and mobile experience so you can focus on promoting the contest and picking a great winner.

Don’t wait to grow your business…

If you need even more inspiration, check out these Facebook marketing guides:

• How to Add Facebook Pixel to WordPress for Remarketing
• Facebook Marketing Tools You Need to Try
• How to Grow Your Facebook Group Faster
• Why You Shouldn’t Buy Facebook Comments
• How to Do a Like and Share Contest on Facebook
• Proven Facebook Marketing Tips for Small Business
• How to Run a Facebook Flash Giveaway
• Facebook Giveaway Examples Brands Actually Use
• How to Get Followers on Facebook
• Facebook Giveaway Ideas Proven to Get Big Results
• How to Increase Engagement on Facebook
• Why You Should Not Buy Facebook Likes

And don’t forget to follow us on YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook for more great tips to grow your business.