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

Ever wonder how some brands get their Facebook followers to share amazing photos of their products? I did too, until I discovered the power of photo contests.

I love running photo contests on Facebook because they do something regular giveaways can’t – they turn your customers into your best marketers. When people share their own pictures using your products or showing off their creativity, it creates excitement that spreads naturally.

And the best part? You end up with a collection of authentic photos you can share with your audience.

In this guide, I’ll walk you through exactly how to run a Facebook photo contest that gets people excited to participate. I’ll share what I’ve learned works best, so you can avoid the common mistakes I made when starting out.

Understanding Facebook Contest Rules

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.

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 I mentioned earlier, photo contests are the ideal type of contest 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 many 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.

Table of Contents

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 that can be used in future marketing campaigns. Create a repository to manage and track the content submissions.
• Enhance Engagement: Measure engagement through the number of 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 the growth in your email list through your email marketing platform.

Whatever your goal, you should have one in place to measure the performance of your giveaway and determine its success. Using specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) criteria will help you set clear objectives and evaluate your contest’s impact effectively.

Importance of Timing and Distribution

Timing plays a crucial role in the success of your contest. Running it around holidays or events can increase participation due to the extra activity on social media during these periods.

Additionally, offering smaller daily prizes leading up to a grand prize at the end can keep users interested and encourage them to engage throughout the contest.

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: To leverage the festive spirit, align your contest with holidays like Mother’s Day, Halloween, or Thanksgiving.
• 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. Remember, 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?
• If your contest is limited to a particular country. Or is it international?
• How can someone 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 I 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 your guidelines.

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

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, the best WordPress giveaway plugin, is a smart choice. It’s also the best photo contest app for Facebook, providing an easy and efficient way to run your contest.

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, setting up your contest takes only a few clicks. This means you can get up and running in no time.

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.

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 I mean. 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.

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, leverage Facebook ads. Targeted advertising helps you reach a broader, yet specific, audience, increasing the likelihood of attracting interested participants.

But don’t stop at Facebook:

• 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, LinkedIn, etc., to tap into different audiences.
• 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.

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 After the Contest

After your contest ends and you’ve picked a winner, there’s still work to do. This time, after the contest, it is important to keep people excited and get the most out of your photo contest.

Here are some steps to take:

• Tell everyone who won. Share the winning photo on Facebook and other social media. Congratulate the winner publicly.
• Thank everyone who entered. This makes people feel good and want to join your next contest.
• Use the photos people sent in. Show the best entries on your website or social media, ask for permission to use them in your marketing, and consider creating a video or album of the top submissions.
• Keep people interested. Keep in touch through emails or social media, offer small prizes or discounts to non-winners, and share insights on how you selected the winner.
• Ask for feedback. Find out what people thought about your contest so you can make the next one even better.
• Start planning your next contest. Use what you learned from this one to make your next contest even more successful.

By doing these things, you’ll keep people interested in your brand even after the contest is over.

Analyzing 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 ispiration, 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.