How to Do a Giveaway on Facebook: Amplify Your Audience and Grow Your Brand in 9 Simple Steps

If you’re looking for new ways to expand reach and engagement for your brand and drive the growth of your business, then learning how to do a giveaway on Facebook can be a fantastic and very effective option.

When running a Facebook giveaway contest, you’ll have some planning, research, and decision making to do. In addition to running a clean giveaway, there are a lot of moving parts that need to align with your brand and audience. 

You can even go a step further and run regular monthly giveaways to anchor your existing fans and increase loyalty and repeat visits to your content. Furthermore, when coupled with event marketing, regular giveaways are a great tactic to attract new customers on a global scale. You just need to have a WordPress Event Registration Plugin to help you manage your events.

Creating a buildup to your giveaways will also drive excitement, shares and even virality.

In this article, Craig Cameron from Chatcloud and I will be looking at how to do a giveaway on Facebook using the Customers.ai chatbot builder. Due to the high levels of user engagement achieved with chat and Customers.ai’s superb features and interface, this is the best way to run a giveaway on Facebook!

Here’s what’s included in this article:

• Why do a giveaway contest?
• What’s the best way to do a giveaway on Facebook?
• How to do a giveaway on Facebook: 9-step setup in Customers.ai
• The real reasons to create a giveaway on Facebook
• How do you promote your Facebook giveaway?
• How much planning is needed before doing a giveaway on Facebook?
• What questions should you ask your giveaway audience?
• What kind of prize should you offer?
• If you create a giveaway on Facebook, can you re-use it?
• A chatbot might be the best way to do a giveaway on Facebook, but is it against Terms of Service?
• Closing thoughts on how to do a giveaway on Facebook

Why run an online giveaway?

Most people may think giveaways are great because who doesn’t like getting things for free, right? However, this isn’t why you should run an online giveaway.

Giveaways and reward-based campaigns have the natural ability to go viral. Yes, that’s because the opportunity to get free stuff makes that more likely, but running an online giveaway means:

• Your brand can get out in front of a lot of people, and
• You can get as many leads on one day as you do on an average month.

There are a lot of moving parts here, and as you analyze the reasons more deeply, you’ll realize that running a giveaway massively builds your audience and engagement. 

As your existing fan base gets excited and shares your giveaway contest with friends, you get fresh followers lining up to join in the fanfare. 

This is one of the best ways to amplify your giveaway, quickly expand your audience, and go viral.

Additionally, giveaways are an opportunity for innovative ideas regarding the rewards, prizes, and incentives you decide to offer.

If you’re looking for marketing campaigns that inspire creativity, running a giveaway is one of your best options.

What’s the best way to do a giveaway on Facebook?

The most basic way to run a giveaway on Facebook would be to make a post on your page with all the details, and perhaps build a landing page outside of Facebook where visitors can fill in their details.

However, taking this approach will not produce your desired results.

This brings with it the usual headaches. You’ll have to build out the pages, set up a database, and check that all of your tracking pixels are firing properly.

But there’s another solution. Thankfully, we are living in an age where chatbots can facilitate an entire Facebook giveaway for you! Using a Customers.ai chatbot, you can automate everything extremely easily.

Chatbots are great for giveaways because they capture valuable data in the interaction at the moment the audience is at their most engaged. Furthermore, bots make this process as frictionless as possible and do all the heavy lifting.

Giveaways convert at higher rates than your average marketing methods. Chatbots are here to take your giveaway to the next level.

How to do a Giveaway on Facebook with a Chatbot in 9 Steps

Step 1: Build your list with Comment Guard

There are a number of ways to create a giveaway on Facebook using Customers.ai.

You can build it in the chat widget or in your Facebook welcome page, and you can also run Messenger ads directly into it.

However, we’re going to be looking at Comment Guard, which allows you to create a flow and connect it directly to an existing post that you have on your Facebook page.

When someone comments on your post, they will trigger your flow and the magic will start to happen.

Here are 5 Comment Guard examples to get the juices flowing!

Step 2: Create the StartBot – First question

After you’ve selected Comment Guards and chosen to create a new one, you’ll need to set up the StartBot. In other words, the flow of messages that will be sent to your chat visitors.

In this example, for the first message, we’ve chosen the “Quick question” widget. This will be designed to get the first response from your visitor.

You’ll have to assign at least one answer option for the visitor to choose before you can proceed.

After defining your question and one or more options for the visitor to choose from, select ‘New path’ to continue the flow. Then click the little plus icon to choose the next element in the flow.

Step 3: Use the chatbot to collect participant emails

For our next item in the flow, let’s collect their email address. Choose ‘Quick question’ from the list of available widgets.

Now we can ask them to verify their email, which in most cases will show automatically, as that data is pulled directly from Facebook. This is one reason why chatbots make collecting giveaway participant emails a seamless process.

As this occasionally doesn’t happen, you can also add, ‘If you don’t see it then type it in’.

Seeing as this is data that we want to save so we can use it later, choose ‘User replies with email’ and check ‘Save response to attribute’ and choose ‘email’.

Step 4: Gather participant data with chatbots – Quick question

After this, we’re going to ask them another quick question. Click the little plus again and choose ‘Quick question’.

Now we can ask our question, assign an answer and create a new path for it, just like we did before.

Step 5: Text response

This time, let’s just respond with text.

Once we’ve set up our simple text-based message, let’s add a typing effect. This is an animation that you’ll be very familiar with from using your phone every day.

The ‘Typing’ chat widget gives the impression that we, the chatbot, are typing another message to our visitor. This is great for keeping people engaged, and making them feel like they’re talking to a live person in real-time.

Step 6: Send a humorous GIF and thank you message

After you’ve selected how long you want your typing period to last, click the little plus again, and this time choose ‘Gif’.

Here you can search through thousands of great animated GIFs to add a touch of humor to the end of your conversational flow.

Before we finish up with the flow, click the little plus again, and add some text. Thank your visitor for taking part in the Facebook giveaway and wish them luck!

Step 7: Tag the participants

This is a very important step. Once you’ve written out your thank you message, you need to click the little plus sign again and choose ‘tags’.

Give your tag a name, maybe something like ‘entered contest’. This will enable you to export this audience later so that you can choose a winner!

Step 8: Set a frequency cap

This provides protection so that if someone comments multiple times on the post, they won’t be sent messages repeatedly about the contest. The default is one hour.

Now you’re all set, press the activate button and we’ll test our flow from the visitor end!

Step 9: Testing your Customers.ai giveaway chatbot

Comment on your Facebook post, and the chat window will pop up with your first question!

Answer the first question and the bot will ask you to confirm your email.

Finish the chat flow, laugh at your own GIF, and then come back to Customers.ai!

Navigate to leads, and then audiences. You’ll see that you’ve been added to the audience.

On this page, you can also sync the audience to Facebook for retargeting. Additionally, you can export the list to a CSV so you can pick a random row as your contest winner!

The real reasons to create a giveaway on Facebook

Doing a giveaway on Facebook is primarily about building your lists, generating new leads, getting more fans, and expanding your network reach. And giveaways are ideal for doing that because handing over your contact details is a small price to pay for the chance of getting something for free.

Once someone is on your list, you can engage with them in new and deeper ways, and you can even address them more specifically if you have put them into a certain audience segment.

That brings us to one of the strongest reasons to create a giveaway on Facebook using Customers.ai. The platform allows you to learn about each visitor through their chat responses, and this allows you to segment the list for better marketing optimization later on!

You can also sync Customers.ai with Facebook to retarget specific audiences that you can create by using tags and attributes, which is incredibly powerful.

How do you promote your Facebook giveaway?

One of the biggest questions we need to answer is, how do we get traffic to our giveaway? Is it better to have organic or paid traffic coming in?

Both traffic sources can provide you with quality, and if you have a good level of engagement on your existing content then you can make use of your organic reach to get entries on your giveaway.

You can also share your giveaway with your existing lists as a great way to segment them.

If you don’t have much organic reach on Facebook, you’ll need to increase ad spend to generate enough traffic.

You can even run an ad directly to your Customers.ai chatbot to get the contest underway immediately and capture the lead when they are the most interested!

How much planning is needed before doing a giveaway on Facebook?

This all depends on what kind of giveaway you want to run, but the most important thing is to make the contest high quality and very exciting for your audience.

You’ll need to carefully consider the question flow that you want to present to your chat visitor, and also the kind of information you want to learn about them for segmentation purposes.

Investing the proper time in segmentation questions will pay dividends later when you have a highly-optimized list ready to market to!

What questions should you ask a giveaway audience?

When thinking about the number of questions to ask your chat visitor, you have several options, and your choice will depend on the type of giveaway you want to run and your evaluation of your audience.

The simplest option is to just ask for their email and nothing else, which is fine, but you’ll be leaving the chance for segmentation on the table.

In most cases we’d encourage that you ask at least 2-3 more questions to gain valuable insights into the preferences of your visitors.

If you ask the other questions first before asking for their email address, perhaps you might lose a few who don’t want to answer questions. On the other hand, if you ask for the email address first, they might close the chat and not answer the other questions!

As always in digital marketing: Test, test, test! It’s the only way to know, and every audience is different.

What kind of prize should you offer?

We’ve seen many businesses offering things like iPads as giveaway prizes, and this is understandable. Something like an iPad has high value and is very desirable, so it seems logical to tempt people with something like this.

However, if you think about this a little, you’ll realize it doesn’t make much sense.

If you offer an iPad as a prize, you’ll get lots of people entering your contest who just want the iPad. They don’t care about your business and they’re not interested in what you do.

In other words, they are not high quality leads.

Instead, consider items that only your target audience would consider high value. We’ve seen the grand prize be a 1-on-1 with the CEO of the company be quite the attraction. And if you’re CEO has that kind of mojo, you just came up with a prize that’s great for both lead quality, as well as cost, because although your CEO will say different, his/her time doesn’t cost you anything!

Offer something high value, but relevant to your brand

We recommend that you offer something that is high value but relevant to your business, for example, a year’s free membership to your programs or a free digital course that would normally be a high ticket offer.

This way, you’ll be collecting details from people who are actually interested in your products and have a higher chance of converting on marketing efforts in the future.

That being said, you’ll still have to look at the cost of whatever it is you’re giving away, and compare that to your average cost per acquisition from.

As always, test everything, run the numbers, and make sure that they make sense!

If you create a giveaway on Facebook, can you re-use it?

Yes! If you’re using Customers.ai to create a giveaway on Facebook, you can run the same campaign again. All you need to do is filter out those who have taken part in the past to save embarrassing repeats. Very useful, especially when you run a successful contest!

A chatbot might be the best way to do a giveaway on Facebook, but is it against Terms of Service?

As long as you have a disclaimer that emphasizes that your giveaway contest is in no way associated with Facebook, then you’re good to go.

All Facebook wants is for your content to be engaging. So, just focus on that. Whether your content is a post, an ad, or both, Facebook will reward it if it’s engaging, and show it to more people.

Closing thoughts on how to do a giveaway on Facebook

To be successful at running a giveaway on Facebook, it’s important to track your numbers and to test everything. Plan out your flow properly to maximize the effectiveness of the giveaway, and make sure you don’t miss the chance to segment your audience right by asking the right questions in your conversational flow.

If you’re looking for the best way to run a giveaway on Facebook, then you’ll want to leverage all the features of Customers.ai and create some awesome chat flows that get you the results you need!

Lastly, for more tips on how to run effective retargeting campaigns, as well as how to make your Facebook giveaway go viral, see #3 and #7 of these 8 Growth Hacking Strategies to try in 2020 and Beyond.

Are you currently conducting giveaways on Facebook? Let us know how it’s going and any questions you have in the comments.

How to Do a Giveaway on Facebook: Important Next Steps

First of all, if you’re interested in doing a giveaway on Facebook, you’re probably also interested in how to do a giveaway on Instagram. Or you could run both simultaneously via Messenger now that it works with both platforms. After looking into that, here’s what to do next: