Dear Competition Sponsor

Dear Competition Sponsor,

On behalf of the many enthusiastic and committed compers in Australia and beyond, I am writing to you to both commend you on your efforts to provide us with the competitions we enter every day and to give you some hints and tips from ‘the other side of the fence’. We fully understand the aims of your competitions.

You want us to engage with your business, your service and your products and in the course of doing so purchase something from you and spread the word: all very possible. However, many competitions are simply not engaging us. We enter them and cross our fingers in the hope that we win a prize but if they haven’t been very interesting or enjoyable, we simply fill in the form with our details and move on to the next one.

The competitions that are more likely to engage us are often simply fun. We don’t want to jump through thousands of difficult hoops to enter. We don’t want to spend hours trawling through your website looking for a hidden code. We don’t want to have to beg all our family and friends to vote for a silly picture of out pet cat. We just want a simple, straightforward competition that not only introduces us to your products but also makes us feel good about them (and you never know; we might even buy some). Just make them fun and keep them simple.

If you are determined to use Facebook to run your competition, please stick to Facebook Rules. Innocent people are being banned and suspended because in many cases you are not. We much prefer competitions run through apps rather than the ‘like’, ‘tag’ and ‘share’ ones which are actually against Facebook Rules. Facebook clearly states that ‘personal timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions’ and that ‘a Facebook Page must not incentivise people to use social plug-ins or to ‘like’ a page’.

You can ask entrants in a Facebook competition to ‘like’ a post. Facebook competitions can be interesting ways to engage us with your business as long as there is a fair way of judging the winners, whether by random selection or by the best or most relevant comment. Most of us enjoy competitions where we have to comment and we also like it if there is more than one prize.

The prizes don’t have to be large or even expensive, just worth the effort and if you use prizes as a way of introducing us to your products, this is a better way of ‘sharing’. Finally, when a competition is over, please make every effort to contact the winner as soon as possible. It is not too hard to send a quick email or private message to the winner rather than expect entrants to check back themselves. Facebook posts don’t automatically reach all ‘likers’, so just by posting the winners is not much help either.

If you have provided a link to the Ts & Cs of the competition (another Facebook requirement) we will be more comfortable about the legitimacy of your competition and more likely to have a good feeling about your business even if we don’t win. A competition is a great way of promoting your business and we would be happy to share our experiences (not just the competition links) with everyone we know, offline or online if we have had a positive experience: if we have been happily engaged and it has been a fun competition as well as fair. You’ll get a lot more ‘likers’ that way too.

Regards,

The Compers of Australia