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

Do you want to learn how to run a photo contest on Facebook?

Running a contest on Facebook is an excellent way to boost your Facebook followers and drive traffic to your website. Plus, photo contests give you access to tons of user-generated content you can use to showcase your products and increase sales.

Running photo contests on Facebook might sound complicated. But the truth is, it’s not! Mainly when you use the best contest software to make it super easy.

So in this article, we show you how to run a photo contest on Facebook, the easiest way, using RafflePress.

Understanding Facebook Contest Rules

Before we 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’s eligible to enter your contest.
• Ensure you’re compliant with local rules and regulations on contests and prizes.
• Include a complete release of Facebook by 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.

Now you understand the official rules; you might be wondering, “how do I do a photo contest on Facebook?”

So let’s tackle that next.

How Do You Run a Photo Contest on Facebook?

As we mentioned earlier, photo contests are the ideal type of contest for gathering user-generated content from your fans. Then, 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 a massive amount of potential customers to your website.

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

Table of Contents

1. Set Goals for Your Contest

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

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 long-term?

Let’s look at a few examples:

• You could run a photo contest to get more Facebook followers.
• You might want to drive traffic from Facebook to your business website to increase sales.
• Maybe you want your Facebook fans to submit photos using your products so you can showcase different use cases on your website.
• You might want more Facebook engagement from you’re existing fans.
• Maybe you want to reach a broader, targeted audience to increase brand awareness.

Whatever your goal might be, you should have one in place to measure the performance of your giveaway and see if it was a success.

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. It could be something simple that’s relevant to your brand or something more complex that requires extra effort.

But keep in mind that if it takes lots of work to enter your contest, you might not attract as many participants as you’d like.

Here are some photo contest themes to give you some inspiration:

• Base your theme on a seasonal event like Mother’s Day, Halloween, or Thanksgiving.
• Family-friendly businesses could ask participants to submit crazy family photos.
• If your business is focused on the property market, you can ask fans to share their favorite photos of their childhood homes.

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

Your contest prize is essentially a bribe to ensure as many people enter your contest as possible. But that doesn’t mean you can offer any old prize.

Your prize should ideally be relevant to your business so that you attract participants who are interested in you. Otherwise, you could end up with tons of entries from people who’ll never look at your page again. They’re just in it for winning the prize and nothing else.

Instead, you could offer people the chance to win your product or service for free. Or you can look at these contest prize ideas for more inspiration.

4. Define Your Facebook Photo Contest Rules

Your next task is to define your Facebook photo contest rules. This tells your fans who can enter and the actions they should take to participate.

Your rules should also include the following details:

• How old people should be to enter. Do they need to be over a certain age?
• If your contest is limited to a particular country. Or is it international?
• How someone can enter your giveaway, and how often can they enter.
• The way you’ll choose a winner. Will you draw winners randomly, create a Facebook voting contest, or use another method?

You should also include a statement saying your contest isn’t sponsored by Facebook, which we explained earlier.

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 the guidelines for you.

With your Facebook photo contest rules template in place, you can finally move on to creating your photo contest for Facebook.

5. Create Your Facebook Photo Contest with RafflePress

RafflePress is the best giveaway plugin on the market and the best photo contest app for Facebook.

Running and creating a photo contest with RafflePress is super easy. And it offers everything you need to meet your giveaway goals so you can grow your email list, drive traffic to your website, and increase your Facebook followers with relative ease.

With the built-in Facebook giveaway template, setting up your contest takes only a few clicks. This means you can get up and running in no time at all.

It automatically adds a giveaway action to view your Facebook page helping 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.

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 stunning, 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.

The benefit of publishing your contest on your website and sharing the link is two-fold.

You’re not only engaging your Facebook audience with new, exciting content, but you’re also sending traffic to your business website. And that increases your chances of turning those visitors into customers.

If you were only to create a Facebook post for your contest, you’d miss out on powerful entry methods that could make your contest go viral. It’d also get super confusing for people to understand since you’d have a lot of information in the post.

Here’s an example of what we mean. Not very clear. And because submissions are in the post comments, it’s pretty 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.

All the contest entries are tracked within the RafflePress builder, so choosing a winner is easy.

Don’t forget to advertise your giveaway using these proven contest promotion ideas.

7. 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.

8. Analyze Your Results

When you’ve chosen a contest winner and told them the good news, it’s time to look at your results. Analyzing your results gives you an idea of how successful your contest was and what you can do to improve your next giveaway.

The easiest way to track and measure your results is by using MonsterInsights, the best Google Analytics plugin for WordPress.

MonsterInsights makes tracking visits to your giveaway page super easy. Plus, you can track other visits to your website, referral traffic, eCommerce traffic, and much more.

Then you can see detailed reports in your WordPress dashboard, meaning you won’t have to leave your website to see the results of your giveaway campaign. You can even use MonsterInsight’s real-time stats to improve your contest while it’s running.

That’s it!

In this article, you’ve learned how to run a photo contest on Facebook. So you can meet your business goals and grow your business faster than ever.

Don’t wait to grow your business…

If you need even more Facebook giveaway ideas, take a look at this article.

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