How to Organize a Giveaway On Your Facebook Page Timeline
August 12, 2020

A Facebook giveaway is a great way to reward your fans and grow your Page audience. Contests for Pages helps you organize two different types of contests : Form Contests and Timeline Contests. In this blog post, we will focus on the latter.

But first, what is a Timeline Contest? Simply put, participants are asked to comment on a Page post for a chance to win a prize. Here is a short list of Timeline Contests organized by our customers. The Contest app fetches all the comments and helps you pick a random winner among the commenters so you can insure a fair giveaway. You can also view useful metrics, export the participants list to Excel and download a winner's badge that you can share on your Page Timeline to announce the winner.

How To Set Up The Promotion On Your Page Timeline

You can set up a promotion in just a few easy steps:

  1. Write a post on your Page Timeline where you invite people to comment for a chance to win a prize.
  2. Include an image so that the post will stand out on the newsfeed.
  3. You can optionally boost the post to reach a broader audience.
  4. Go to the Contests for Pages app and start a new Timeline Contest.
  5. Select your Page and the post you just wrote from the dropdown lists.
  6. Submit the form and wait for the app to fetch the comments.
  7. Draw a random winner or wait until the end of the promotion to do so.
Example of a badge you can use to announce the winner on your Page

Facebook Rules On Page Promotions

Although it is 100% legal to run a promotion on a Page Timeline, there is a few basic rules that you should follow. We strongly recommend that you read the Facebook policy for promotions on Pages, Groups, and Events.

Here is the most important paragraph of the policy regarding the administration of a promotion:

Promotions may be administered on Pages, Groups, Events, or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines and friend connections must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend's Timeline to get additional entries”, and "tag your friends in this post to enter" are not permitted).

It is clear from this rule that you cannot ask participants to share your post or tag a friend. However there are quite a few things you can still ask participants to do:

  • Name a friend in their comment (they might end up tagging them anyway)
  • Like your Page
  • Like the post

For privacy reasons, Facebook no longer shares the list of Page fans with third-parties so the app cannot inform you if commenters are also Page fans. The app will however show you how each commenter reacted to the post.