It’s a long-time success formula for Facebook: competitions + ads keeps your fans happy and engaged. I’ve written before about why not like and share. When we were managing social media for Maxol, we succeeded in coming up with creative competitions week in, week out. Our work for Maxol got us to the finals at the Sockies Awards. Below are some examples of Facebook competition mechanics that worked well. Feel free to borrow our ideas and adapt them for your own Facebook competitions.

In 2016, we ran 40 Facebook competitions for Maxol.

That’s almost one new competition a week!  There were so many to choose from, but here are some of our favourites.

No.7: Valentines Day Facebook Competition: Crowd Sourced Date Night

So let’s talk about the bones of a good competition. You want to be seasonal, you want to be engaging, and you want to get attention from as many people as you can before parting with your prize.

We ran a such a Valentines promotion between 8-12 February 2016 that encouraged fans to tell us the components of the ideal date night. The prize was to win the date! The competition mechanic was to tag your other half or who you’d bring. This drove engagement through the roof!

No.6 Road Trip Week: Feb/March 2016

Maxol is an Irish-owned forecourt retailer. What better way to promote that than to talk about road trips in Ireland?

We put together some extra beautiful pictures of the Irish countryside and asked fans for their best road trip advice. This week’s prize – a €100 fuel voucher from Maxol.

What was extra special about this one was the opportunities for real engagement with fans. These ones really stood out:

No 5: How Irish Are You QUIZ for St Patrick’s Day (7-18 March)

Educate or entertain. The golden rules of content marketing. Well this time we certainly entertained with a fun quiz and a little nod to patriotism. This Brightspark quiz which we produced to sit on the Maxol website instantly resonated with this Irish audience. The questions were all humorous, with a little self-deprecation that we’re so fond of.

The quiz lived on the website, and fans had to enter their email address in order to get the quiz answer and to enter the competition. We generated huge numbers of email optins, which was our KPI at the time.  The bonus to the site visits was that all visitors could be targeted for remarketing purposes in the week after.  We promoted the quiz on Twitter and Facebook, with a different prize for each to reflect the different demographic makeup of the audiences there. A family day out for the broader client base of Facebook, a free lunch for the younger Twitter audience.

No.4 Win Kit For Your Team (30 May – 16 June)

With the European Cup taking place in France, football was on everyone’s radar, and we had an opportunity to offer a great sporting prize. The prize was a full set of custom made jerseys for a lucky sports team, along with a few extra freebies like water bottles and footballs. It was advertised across both Facebook and Twitter.

The mechanic of the competition was an entry form for the jerseys that lived on the website. It included a teaser question about Maxol’s new TV advertisement that was being released around this time. It included a lead generation form, and the fact the form was on the website allowed us to do some Facebook remarketing.

No.3 “#ISeaYourEmoji” Maritime Festival Competition (20-30 June)

As sponsor of the Maritime Festival in Drogheda, Maxol had some nifty prizes to give away. The festival organisers loved the Emoji competition we had run for Maxol at Christmas, so we combined these with the hunt mechanic we’d used successfully on previous Easter competitions. We hid some pictures of Emojis into the pictures on the festival’s timeline. To enter, fans had to find the Emoji and comment “#ISeaYourEmoji” to be in with a chance to win. It was all about driving engagement on the Page, and our goal was to drive the Maxol Facebook fans to the Maritime Festival’s page. It worked really weel.

No.2 HB-Maxol Ice Cream Giveaway (22-25 July)

There is probably no season, except perhaps Christmas, more hotly anticipated in Ireland than Summer. So in summer 2016, we put together a joint promotion for Maxol with HB Ice Cream. The prize? An ice cream party for you and your whole office.

This was pretty successful and you can get the “full scoop” on this competition.

The competition ran between 25-29 July at the height of summer, and we again used a quiz mechanic (because they are fun and they work!). The ice cream themed questions ran with colourful pictures like this. As you can see above, it was distributed across Twitter and Facebook.

As with other other work, engagement was strong, and positive. We really liked this one because something about the ice cream and summer brought out the inner child from our fans.

We received dozens upon dozens of positive engagements, and not to boast but 90% of entrants opted in to our newsletter. Tasty!

So what was the top performing Facebook competition for Maxol in 2016?

No.1 – “What Type of Driver Are You?” Quiz (11-22 January)

Yes, this unassuming little quiz was not only effective in driving traffic from Facebook to the Maxol website and generating thousands of opted in email leads, it was so popular that we were asked by fans to bring it back, which we did because we exist to serve our fans, right?

We love quizzes at Brightspark, and because we knew our audience so well by this stage, we were able to write witty questions and drive people towards answers that were fun and sharable. And the key words here are sharable and engaging. The Driver Type Quiz was the only competition in 2016 that consistently broke triple digit levels of engagement, and double digit shares on almost every post for its entire life span. We’ve had plenty of successful competitions before, but this one was well above the usual curve for Maxol.

So here’s the takeaway for facebook competitions: quizzes, a sense of humour, and colourful creative at the heart of what we did for Maxol in 2016.

What do you think?

Feel free to borrow any of these ideas and adapt them for your audience. If you’d like a little help getting things underway, get in touch. We’d love to help you. We write and produce ace quizzes that work across mobile and desktop. Our in-house design and copywriting rocks and can be adapted to suit any audience.