How to win contest?

Facebook has established itself as the largest social site. Many companies and organizations have explored ways of marketing their products and services through the site. The trick is to accumulate as many likes and comments on their pages as possible. To achieve this objective, the companies use different strategies. One of these is to create Facebook contests. Participants in the contests are required to like a certain photo or fan page. Obviously, the winner is the person who gets the most likes for their fan page or photo. Most participants fail to get the prize because they do not know how to win facebook contest. Here are a few simple tricks that they should try out.

Make sure you and your friends know the rules:

Different facebook contests may have different rules. Breaking the rules may invalidate some votes or even total disqualification from the contest. Understanding the rules will help you to give clear instructions to your friends. This will ensure that none of their votes are invalidated due to mistakes committed while voting. Help your voters to understand the rules by breaking down the voting steps into simple steps that are easy to follow. Most voters would shy from complicated or hard to comprehend instructions. You do not want to lose their votes as every vote counts.

Request votes from friends and family:

Having many facebook friends can be an invaluable asset that can help you win a Facebook contest. All you have to do is send requests asking for their support. It is also a great idea to ask them to request their friends and their friend’s friends to vote for you. If you are a member of a facebook group, you can request group members to vote. Some of them may even offer you advice on how to win Facebook contest if they or their friends have ever participated and won.

Exchange votes with other contestants:

Exchanging votes with contestants from other contests can bring you so many votes. You can do this by voting for the contestants and then leaving them a message requesting them to return the favor. You can also request some of your friends to vote for them and request that they do the same with their friends. Before trying this method, it is advisable to revisit the contest rules. This is because some contests do not allow vote exchange.

Buy Facebook contest votes:

Most winners make good strategies on how to win Facebook contest. One of the best strategies of winning a contest is by buying votes online. The tactic works best if you surprise the other contestants by buying votes that increase your vote count when the contest is almost coming to an end. This will enable you to have a good estimate of the number of votes you will need to buy to beat the other contestants to the prize. Again, it is advisable to confirm if it is within the rules of the contest. You should also ensure that you buy real contest votes from trusted sites.

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Researchers in Norway have even published a new psychological scale to measure Facebook addiction. Yet, while these all focus on personal afflictions, I wonder whether there’s a similar phenomenon with businesses today.

Can a business spend too much time on Facebook? And what are some of the negative consequences?

1. It lowers employee productivity.
When social networking first arrived on the scene, employers’ biggest fear was the time suck — productivity levels would drop as employees spent too much time on their personal Facebook pages.

But Facebook can also be an enormous resource drain, even when employees are using it for business purposes. That’s because Facebook isn’t free. Cultivating a community, moderating discussions, responding to feedback and other Facebook page activities require an ongoing commitment.

Considering that resources are always finite, any resources allocated for Facebook must be pulled away from other activities. Without explicit goals, Facebook can easily become a massive waste of time, draining important resources from other marketing, sales and customer service priorities.

2. It encourages unfair comparisons.
A recent study from the University of Michigan found that Facebook use leads to declines in moment-to-moment happiness and overall life satisfaction in college-aged adults. According to research co-author John Jonides, “When you’re on a site like Facebook, you get lots of posts about what people are doing. That sets up social comparison — you maybe feel your life is not as full and rich as those people you see on Facebook.”

Likewise, small businesses, especially those just launching their campaigns, can easily become discouraged when comparing themselves to Pepsi, Pampers, Starbucks, Virgin Atlantic and other brands on Facebook. Running campaigns at that level takes a tremendous amount of strategy, resources (both internal and external) and expertise.

This pressure to “keep up with the Joneses” can have two negative consequences. One, businesses may end up spending more time on Facebook due to competitive reasons, as opposed to basing their priorities on actual business objectives or realities. Secondly, businesses may end up focusing on the “wrong” aspects of Facebook, such as racking up fans.

3. It’s difficult to measure.
Wanting to succeed on Facebook, many businesses hone in on some of the easiest metrics around: the number of fans and the number of likes. After all, these numbers can be a very visible measure of status, and it’s easy to treat the site like a game in which the whole goal is to amass more likes than your competitors.

However, just how much does the number of Facebook fans matter? Many businesses host contests and offer discounts in exchange for clicking the Like button. For example, I once liked a store that I’ve never shopped at (and have no plans to either), simply because it was raffling off a vacation. I never visited its page or interacted with its brand after that initial like (and shortly after, unliked it because I was tired of seeing the updates). If this brand included my like as an indication of positive consumer engagement, it was definitely wrong.

The real question is, how do you measure the value of your Facebook fans? How many fans do you need to create a new customer or sale? Unless you have a way to prove that your Facebook page is making you money, you may run the risk of wasting substantial resources here instead of focusing your efforts elsewhere.

4. There’s no direct link to sales.
Facebook can be an ideal channel for generating buzz and engagement, but this doesn’t necessarily translate into sales — at least in the short term.

A 2012 Forrester study analyzed 77,000 online transactions over a two-week period and found that less than 1% of transactions could be traced to social media (compared with 40% from organic or paid search, and 30% from repeat business sparked from email).

If you’re looking for more proof that Facebook is not an effective direct sales channel, consider the fact that the number of U.S. retailers with Facebook-enabled checkouts plummeted from 63% in Q4 2011 to just 6% in Q4 2012.

Again, Facebook can play an important role in building relationships, but as a small business owner, I need to make sure we’re investing resources in those activities that have a more direct link to the bottom line.

5. There’s no human connection in the cloud.
Engaging via email or Facebook is entirely different than actually talking to someone in person or over the phone. A one-on-one conversation creates a deeper connection, and a more detailed exchange of ideas. The biggest risk for businesses with Facebook is assuming that social media engagement is the only customer interaction you need.

The New York Times illustrated just how difficult it is to reach a social media company on the phone: “Twitter’s phone system hangs up after providing web or email addresses three times. At the end of a long phone tree, Facebook’s system explains it is, in fact, ‘an Internet-based company.’ Try email, it suggests.”

Facebook and Twitter are excellent initial touch points for customer support, but nothing beats personal conversations.

In the end, be realistic.
I’m not advocating that any business should walk away from social media. However, you need to be realistic about the potential returns. Invest your resources based on the opportunity, rather than just because everyone else is doing it.

Image: iStockphoto, courtneyk

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One of the owners, Admir Adil, noticed his 15-year-old daughter was incessantly checking Facebook, so he thought it only appropriate to create a flavor for other fans obsessed with the social media behemoth.

Admir and his brother Ibi Adil created their Facebook-flavored ice cream by simply mixing blue syrup atop vanilla ice cream and placing a small sign with a Facebook logo on it. Selling a scoop for a euro ($1.32), the ice cream apparently tastes like sugary sweets and chewing gum, but it’s become a hit as many passersby were immediately drawn to Facebook’s trademark logo — as well as the novelty.

The duo said they have not contacted Mark Zuckerberg for trademark use.

Image: Dusko Jaramaz/PixSell

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When it comes to Facebook, however, monthly active users have become a mere side dish to the more relevant main course that is “daily active users.” During the company’s Q2 earnings call, there was an entire menu of them: Daily actives worldwide (699 million), mobile daily actives (469 million in June), and even the number of active users during America’s daily primetime television hours (88 to 100 million).

So when Facebook unveiled its daily active users figure for the U.S. last week — 128 million — it didn’t simply break the industry standard, it began the process of rewriting it.

“A lot of people focus on monthly active users or even registered users to demonstrate their size and scale,” the Menlo Park, Calif. company wrote in an email to media. “We think this is becoming on old way of looking at the media world. In this world, understanding who comes back at least once a month is only part of the picture.”

Facebook defines “daily active users” as those who “actively visited/engaged with Facebook.” In other words, active users are considered anyone who uses their Facebook login, even if it’s for a third-party app.

A company spokesperson said the announcements highlighting daily active users won’t come regularly, and that there is still value in monitoring and publishing monthly active users. Facebook’s actions, however, seem to demonstrate its dedication to using the new metric.

For a company with the social-media giant’s user base, there are multiple benefits to releasing daily user figures. For starters, they uphold the network’s position as an industry leader, but these figures can also have a major impact on ad sales by providing marketers with information on exactly who they can reach and when.

“Our clients rely on Facebook to connect their message with the people that matter to them, every hour of every day,” Will Platt-Higgins, Facebook’s director of global accounts, said in a statement. “We want to provide marketers with helpful metrics and insights on consumer behavior, across all devices, to maximize the effectiveness of their campaigns. If a business has a sale on Monday, or if a film is premiering, Facebook gives marketers the certainty that they are reaching the right people, on any given day.”

Of course, changing the industry standard — intentionally or not — requires participation from said industry. Other social networks don’t break out daily active users, although some appear to share Facebook’s mindset.

“We look at a number of signals for engagement, but since most members rely on Nextdoor on a daily basis, it makes sense for us to focus on daily and weekly actives,” Nirav Tolia, co-founder and CEO of Nextdoor, said in a statement. Nextdoor, a social network for neighborhoods, does not reveal its daily active user data.

Path, a social network for close friends and family, has a similar view.

“What we care most about is that people use the app multiple times every day,” Nate Johnson, the company’s vice-president of marketing, said. “We pay very close attention to that.” Path also doesn’t publish daily user data.

Other social networks such as LinkedIn, however, are not convinced.

“LinkedIn will continue to use monthly average users as a way to gauge engagement,” according to a company statement. “Because we focus on the quality of time spent by our members rather than the amount of time, monthly average user continues to be a meaningful metric for advertisers who want to drive engagement over time.”

Both microblogging service Twitter and Google+, the second-most popular social platform behind Facebook based on monthly active users, declined to comment. (Vine, the video-sharing service owned by Twitter reported total registered users on Tuesday, but not monthly actives.)

For the time being, Facebook appears to be in a league of its own, and said it plans to continue releasing monthly active user metrics. After all, it is the industry standard.

Would you rather receive data about a social network’s daily or monthly active users? Give us your take in the comments, below.

Image: Flickr, Robert Scoble

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Kenshoo Social, a digital marketing company that works with “hundreds” of customers that advertise on Facebook, explored more than 75 billion Facebook ads over the past two quarters, finding evidence that the ads are not only working, but are in some cases undervalued. Kenshoo is considered a preferred marketing developer (PMD), meaning the company has been uniquely identified by Facebook as a marketer “driving outstanding positive impact.” In other words, Kenshoo and Facebook work closely together to ensure ad success for both companies.

Facebook advertisers who work with Kenshoo, including brands like Sears, Ticketmaster and CareerBuilder, reportedly saw an 18.5% increase in click through rates in Q2 over Q1, and revenues driven by Facebook ads were up nearly 30%. Click rates increased 16% and user interactions with the ads — likes, shares or comments — also increased by 57%. The research is not indicative of all Facebook advertisers — only those Kenshoo works with — but with 75 billion ads in the sample, it does offer a snapshot of Facebook ad performance.

Even with ad metrics up, advertisers using “last click conversion” attributions — that is, giving the ad credit only if a sale is directly from a user click on Facebook — actually undervalue Facebook ads by 30%, according to Aaron Goldman, the CMO of Kenshoo. This does not give the ad credit in scenarios in which users view an ad and then make a purchase at a later date, still driven by the ad but not immediately from Facebook.

Kenshoo isn’t the only marketing company to claim social media ads are undervalued. Monetate, which offers cloud-based marketing technology to customers, described a similar trend in its Q1 ecommerce quarterly report earlier this year. The report pointed to the “stickiness” of social media as a reason click through rates aren’t higher; users don’t want to leave the page so they store the ad information in their head for later use.

Facebook’s apparent increase in ad success can be attributed to two factors, Goldman said. First, advertisers are getting better at narrowing down their target audiences and honing in more appropriately on users who may find the ad engaging. Plus, Facebook’s algorithm is improving, meaning the site can better pinpoint relevant users within an advertiser’s target audience.

Ampush, another Strategic PMD who works with dozens of companies advertising on Facebook, is also seeing increases in user ad engagement. For Ampush, mobile use and the increase of page post ads and mobile app install ads has been another major driving factor. “The overall growth in mobile has definitely correlated and contributed to the overall trend towards improved ad metrics overall for Facebook,” says Chris Amos, Ampush co-founder and CMO.

A separate recent study by Salesforce Marketing Cloud explored Facebook’s ad performance over the first three months of the year, noting a major difference in ad performance based on region. Both Europe and Asia-Pacific saw substantially higher click through rates on ads than the Americas, with Asia-Pacific more than 60% above the global average. Salesforce, a third Strategic PMD, has not yet released its finding from Facebook’s Q2, and a spokesperson declined to comment on whether or not Salesforce saw increases similar to Kenshoo and Ampush.

Image: Kim White/Getty Images

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This is the gist of new research from the cloud marketing technology firm Unified Social. Jeff Widman, the director of research there, recently crunched some numbers and found that posts that were sponsored in the first 24 hours received 2.6 times more viral impressions and 2.7 times more viral engagements than older promoted posts.

EdgeRank looks at story’s momentum to determine the number of people exposed to the post. In other words, it attempts to sense virality and then helps it along. A paid update amplifies that initial impact, making it seem more viral and thus receiving better treatment from EdgeRank.

While it seems like common sense for brands to promote only their freshest posts, Widman said this is often not the case. Such posts are often handled by an outside agency that “doesn’t come back for a couple of days or a week or more,” he said.

However, Widman added that in order to get the most out of EdgeRank, Facebook’s News Feed algorithm, you need to build on a post’s momentum once it hits the first time.

One caveat about Widman’s research: He examined a seemingly very small sample, just three unnamed brands over a one-week period. While Widman agrees that “it’s certainly not billions” of data points, it’s more about the money spent and the impressions than the number of posts. Despite the small sample size, Widman said he stands by the research. “It makes sense intuitively,” he said.

Image: Andreas Ivarsson

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Mobile Technologies, founded in 2001, built Jibbigo, an app for iPhone and Android that the company describes as “the world’s first speech-to-speech translator on a phone that runs online and even off-line.” The company will join Facebook at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif.

“Voice technology has become an increasingly important way for people to navigate mobile devices and the web, and this technology will help us evolve our products to match that evolution,” Tom Stocky, Facebook’s director of product management, wrote in a post. “We believe this acquisition is an investment in our long-term product roadmap as we continue towards our company’s mission.

Image: Mashable composite, Facebook and Jibbigo

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