Facebook Contests and Article Marketing for Your Business

With the social media giant Facebook threatening to overtake Google, itself, most veteran businesses are starkly aware of the powers of social media marketing to expand the reach of their products and services. At the beginning of the New Year, a metric from Nielsen shows Facebook securely in the second spot, and climbing. If nothing else, this is proof positive that recommendations from Facebook Friends are nearly as important as organic search with the Google search engine. The question, then, is how do you, as a businessperson, break into this veritable treasure-trove that is Facebook, by getting more friends?

Similarly to article marketing – which we’ll compare later – a Facebook contest is an excellent way to corral viable and legitimate traffic; but only, of course, if you have a great product. Just knowing the definition of “contest” makes it self-explanatory how useful one is; but when used correctly on a Facebook business page, it can take your business from essentially zero to flirting with numbers released by top brands.

A Facebook contest is essentially passively marketed, because the people who first interact with it are the ones that do the work in spreading the word. To increase audience-engagement, it is essential that you tie the chances of winning directly into how many new friends they bring into the fold; and, since you presumably have a good or great product already, that fact alone will provide the necessary staying power. No amount of marketing is going to cause a shoddy product that doesn’t fulfill a need or desire to proliferate. Additionally, simplicity is a virtue; the rules should be easy-to-read and small in number, as should the requirements for participation. Another option for holding the interest of your audience is highly-dependent on your particular brand: how attractive is your Facebook contest for purposes of sustained interaction? Is it involved somehow with a game app like The Sims, and serves as a creative outlet for the player? Is it as cool as Angry Birds, and make everyone who plays it want to share it with a friend? With over 90% of the 250 million Internet users in America involved in some form with Social Media (keep in mind that Facebook, in particular, further dominates that arena), making a YouTube video to serve as a vehicle for your Facebook contest can truly work wonders for your brand.

Ultimately, the biggest advantage of a Facebook contest is the relationship it has with article marketing, which is the other method to help your product rank highly, and draw targeted visitors. When used together, they pretty much guarantee that whatever you are pitching has staying power, as long as the product, itself, is a good one with some utility to the interested consumer.