Facebook tools are the engine room of Facebook marketing.
They are the nuts and bolts that turn a Facebook page from a pretty face to a marketing portal. If you want to run a contest, create a custom tab and offer incentives you need some help.
Here are four Facebook tools to help you run contests directly on your timeline.
Agorapulse TopFan
How it works
Login with Facebook at Agorapulse.com, install a free trial account on your Facebook Page and then, install the Top Fan App on your page. The whole process should not take you more than 5 minutes. Then, the app will automatically display a ranking of your most active fans for the last 30 days for free.
The good
The setup is pretty easy from the admin side, and fans don’t have to install the app to be ranked, unlike other “fan ranking” apps. It is a great way to boost engagement other time because the top fan app does not only focus on the engagement on one specific post like other solutions but look at the activity of the fans during the last 30 days.
If fans are motivated to remain active during 30 days to get a higher ranking they will bring more activity to the page overall than if you ask them to like or comment a single post to enter.
The bad
The first cons is that you have to be a subscriber of an Agorapulse paid plan to have the ranking updated in real time if you want to elect your “top fan” daily or weekly. With the free trial, you can only get that ranking monthly by renewing your trial every month. However, the paid plan offers you a lot of other features and is not limited to managing timeline contests.
The second cons is that if you are looking to pick a winner among likes or comments of one specific post, this app will not do the job. The other solutions below will be your best choice.
Woobox
How it works
Create a free Woobox account if you haven’t done so, select the page you want to run the competition on, go to the “Posts” menu on top, choose the concerned post and click on “pick”, you will then be prompted to pick a winner from the likes or the comments. Click pick a winner and you’re done. You can also pick several winners by clicking on “pick a winner” multiple times.
The good
It’s free to use! It is also pretty simple and straightforward. If you are just looking to randomly pick winners who engaged with a specific post and want it for free, this is a good choice.
The bad
You have to create a Woobox account, but it’s free though. The ways to pick winners are limited: winners can be randomly picked among the likes and the comments on one post. You can’t run more elaborated contests (like most active fans during a specific period, quiz, guess a word or anything that is not “random”).
FanPageKarma
How it works
Just go to the FanPage Karma Good Luck Fairy page, enter the URL of your Facebook post and click “identify winners” and here you go! To find the URL of your Facebook post, just click on the date of the concerned post and it will be displayed with its own unique URL.
The system will pick one winner at random from the likes, one from the comments, one from the likes and comments combined and one among the comments who had the most votes on her comment.
The good
It’s free to use! It is super easy to use too, just copy the URL of your post and you get your winner. It can’t be simpler. Also, you don’t need to create an account with FanPageKarma nor do you have to login with Facebook.
The bad
The ways to pick winners are limited: you have winners picked at random from the likes and comments and one among the comments who had the most votes on her comment. You can’t run more elaborated contests (like most active fans during a specific period, quiz or anything that is not “random”). Also, the downside of not having to create an account is that you can’t keep track of who were the winners, so you have to make a screenshot of the results.
Shortstack
How it works
You need to create an account with Shortstack, then create a database, then setup the database, choose the post you’d like to extract likes and comments from and import them into the database. The process is not as easy as the one offered by Woobox, but it does the same job.
They created a tutorial to show users how to do it:
The good
If you already have a Shortstack paid account and know how to setup a database in their system, this is a great addition to their existing features.
The bad
The first cons is that you have to be a subscriber of one of Shortstack’s paid plan to use that feature. For those looking for a free tool, this will not be the one. However, as with Agorapulse, the paid plan offers you a lot of other features and is not limited to managing timeline contests.
The second cons is that you have to create a Shortstack database before you can use that feature. This is definitely not as plug & play as the other options mentioned above and will require some setup work on your end.
Guest Author: Emeric is the co-founder of AgoraPulse, a Paris and San Francisco based Facebook Marketing Software launched in 2011. AgoraPulse is used by more than 17,000 Facebook Pages.
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