Last weekend was CU's first football game of the year versus in-state rival Colorado State, nicknamed the Rocky Mountain Showdown. We had a big tailgate celebration and our office bought 4 tickets to the game that we decided to give-away by doing a Facebook photo contest in the week leading up to the game. We asked people to submit their best CU pride photos and asked our Facebook fans to vote on their favorites (full contest rules here).
The first place gentleman won great seats to the game with 80 votes (hard to see, but he's wearing a CU sweatshirt and he's at the top of Mt. Fuji)!
The second place runner-up finished strong with 54 votes.
Overall, we were thrilled with the response with 9 people submitting photos and over 250 people voting on their favorite pictures (see all photos here). We accumulated over 200 new Facebook fans and our Facebook insights (metrics) gave us 5 stars for "post quality" for the week. A great success? Yes. But would we do everything the same again? No. Below are the dos and don'ts for future Facebook photo contests.
Do
- Get the word out to as big an audience as possible. We posted a Facebook status message, Tweeted a link to the contest rules (and asked people to RT), put up signs around the building, included a message in our weekly student e-newsletter, and spread the message via word-of-mouth.
- Have people send photos directly to you as opposed to them posting directly to the site. We liked that we were able to standardize the format of the album, review photos before they were posted and look up an individual's class year, etc.
- Follow up and thank everyone who submitted a photo and remind them to get their friends to vote for them. Though voting was open to everyone, we noticed that the people with the most votes reached out their friends and got them to vote.
- Stick to your deadlines. We had the contest end at 5:00 p.m. so we
made sure we were on the site at 5:00 p.m. to note who won. It came down to the wire with a couple
people battling it out so we needed to be prompt and on the ball when
ending the contest to determine the true winners.
- Promote the winners through photos on the Facebook site so people can see who the winners were.
Don't
- Have a photo submission deadline. It someone submits a photo late in the game, it's only to their disadvantage that they won't have as much time to get people to vote for them. I received a great photo after our photo submission deadline that I wasn't able to include because I didn't want to break our own rules.
- Run the contest over an extended period of time. Our contest took place over the course of one week. If we'd spread it out longer, we probably wouldn't have had the urgency or competition that came out due to the short deadline.
- Assume everyone will know how to 'vote' for their favorite picture. We learned late in the game that you had to be a 'fan' of the Leeds School of Business before you were allowed to vote. One loyal alumna had forwarded her photo to dozens of friends and family but many couldn't determine how they could vote because they weren't fans of the page. Though we know that some individuals realized they had to be fans to vote (as we gained new fans and over 250 voted), we didn't specifically spell out that fact and didn't know ourselves until close to the deadline. It resulted in an unhappy participant:
Though a few kinks presented themselves, we're happy with how it went overall and are thinking ahead to the Homecoming game to determine how we'll give those tickets away. We'll probably peruse some other institutions websites for great ideas. Any suggestions you want to share?
The cool thing was how many people shared their photos given the quick turn around for this content. Great work Sarah, looking forward to our next one.