How to run a Facebook Giveaway for Hospitality Businesses

Hello, everybody. This is a very impromptu live video that we are doing in the group. If you are seeing this video, if you could please do me a massive favor and just comment below, let us know that you can a, hear Emma and I and C, Emma and I, and we will get started. As you can see from the video today, let me just turn me down. We are going to be talking about how to run the perfect Facebook competition. Going to give you some little tactics, some little tips that we have done over the past that has helped get loads of reach, loads of likes, loads of inquiries, loads of bookings on the back of it. And I asked Emma, because if anybody has ever done any of the training before you, you will know that Emma's competitions always go amazingly well. And she's kind enough to agree to do this live video in the group for you all. And we can pass on some tactics and tips. So if anybody has got any questions on what you should be doing, anything that you should be looking out for, whether it's what to do next, et cetera, how to set it up, please put it in the comments below. This is all gonna to interlink with the 24th of September, when we're going to be doing a week's long worth of training on how to do the perfect competition. So I wanted to do this video to get going, and we will get started very, very shortly. If there's somebody in the background as I need to say hi, If you need to go off and answer, that's absolutely fine, but if we'll get started. So basically, without further ado, I'm gonna let Emma introduce herself, tell her where she is in the world, the name of the guest house, and then we'll get started. So, Emma, over to you.

Hiya. So I'm Emma. Emma Pard. We've got the Riviera Guest House on Westlith in Whitby. I run that with my husband and my two preschool children. We've been here nearly eight years now. My dad, who had it a couple.

Years before us, Amazing. Thank you very much. Okay, so, Sharon, Paul, Rosemary, how we doing? Thank you for watching. When you come into the group, just let us know if you're watching this live or if you're watching this on the replay, especially if you're watching this live, because I need your questions. So any questions that you may have regarding the competition, regarding what's going to be coming up, let us know. But we're just going to have a little chat with gonna. I'm gonna ask Emma a few questions what she did, what we did, and then we'll just go from there. So, Emma, how many times now do you think that you've run these Facebook competitions? Is it a couple of times? I think.

Probably ran four, I think now. No, maybe five. Four or five we've run now and they generally are getting more and more successful, which is. Well, it's probably down to the fact that we're growing our followers now. So more and more, it's getting more and more exposure. Each competition will get more and more exposure and also the tips and tricks that you are providing us because really, I cannot take all of the credit for our Facebook competitions. A lot of it has come from what Mark has been, from following Mark's training on your training. So, yeah, probably four or five now. I think this may be.

Do you, I mean, how many followers off the top of your head do you have right now of the Facebook page? I think it's near like 12, 13,000. Is that right?

We must have started Facebook, our Facebook page about seven years ago and slowly we grew it up to about 5000 likes before we started working with Boosley. And then we remember we started doing competition two and a half years ago. And two and a half years ago we started with a Valentine's competition. So it'll be three years ago this Valentine's. We've grown from 5,000 up to 13,000 in that time. And to be honest, that majority of that has come from Facebook competitions.

Definitely amazing. So we're nearly a massive growth there. Just one thing, Emma. Rosemary said that she can't really hear you. It's a low volume. Do you have headphones like this near you at all or. Okay, no worries, I'll keep talking. Thank you very much. Alright, so just again, if everybody can hear me, okay, just let us know. Just hit the thumbs up, say that you can hear me. Emma is just going to get the headphones. It was funny yesterday because we're doing the live with Amanda in the boosted community and we're talking about headphones and how do you get these old school iPhone headphones into the new iPhone 8s that don't have the headphone jack? So did you find that yesterday?

Okay, Emma, can she hear me better now? I've just taken my hand probably off the speaker. Can you hear me better now, Rosemary?

Rosemary, if you're still there, let us know if everybody can hear us. Okay? A couple of people are putting in the form of Andrew Deborah, if you can hear okay, that would be great. Okay. Barbara has put her thumb up so that means that she can hear us. All right. Which is perfect. Okay. So when running the competition, because I'm going to show everybody how to prepare for a competition, I'm going to show everybody the steps to set up. But it's good to find out from somebody that is doing the training, has done the training in the past. Are there any little tips and tricks that you can advise that once the competition is running, anything you can do that makes your life easier or that can just mean that more and more people can see the actual post?

Do you mean before I've even started it, just anything?

Yeah, anything that you've taken, anything that.

You'Ve done before I start running them, I always check that I've got the right cover photo, the right profile pic, because we're going to get a lot more exposure to our Facebook page. So I want it to be looking as best as it possibly can do. So I put a nice picture of the view as my cover picture. I put our profile as our profile pic, I put our logo. So then when anyone's commenting, when we're commenting, people are seeing our brand on all the comments. Some good chatty, like maybe nice views, events posts before the competition. Because people I found do scroll back. I get a lot more interaction on posts that I've published previously. So I make sure that there's some good content on the Facebook page before the competition. I mean, currently I've got, I might take it off, actually, a toy car with a load of mold and hair on, which is our recent post, which was just a bit of a fun thing that I put on. So I think I'll take that off before running the Facebook competition.

That's a really good one and it's something that I never touch on. So that is fantastic. Thanks for sharing that. When you run a competition, don't be surprised at how many people are going to click onto your page to investigate more about you. And especially seeing that we're really pushing the book direct message at the moment. In your cover photo, if you can amend a few words to get a nice picture of your view your bedroom and have the words it pays to book direct, you know, book direct with us, then that will be really effective because people will know who you are, what you're doing, what this competition is all about, with a nice logo as well, they'll know who you are and why they should be booking with you. So, yeah, 100% look at what your posts have been just before, maybe update them a little bit, add a couple of links and make sure your cover photo sells the property and your profile pic is a logo or again, your unique selling one. Awesome. So good prep.

Also noting your current likes because we always forget what our current like number is and then we're trying to remember. So it's just good to go back and know how many. How successful it's been.

Yeah, that's awesome. Okay, so the competition's live. So it's say It's Monday the 24th. We've just hit post. What's the first things that you do in that day to make sure that the the competition gets seen by as many people as possible? For example, do you go and email your list? Do you check the comment of the app during the day to make sure that people are liking? What do you sort of do when the day goes live?

So we will. Whenever we're getting comments, we try to respond to them because I mean, ours goes pretty crazy so we can't respond to them all. But trying to be chatty as you can on it, it makes other people who are commenting on it and looking at it make it look like you're bothered as a business about the people that are commenting on it. So, oh, this is, you know, it's not just a chain of hotels. This is someone who's friendly and actually is interested in the people that they want to get interested in their business. It also spreads it out further afield when you have more comments on your posts. I give Zed, my husband, the job of inviting everyone to like our page. So everyone that comment, everyone that likes the post, you can then go into your likes. This is my favorite thing you've taught us. Go into the likes and then it'll give you a list of all the people that have liked or loved your post. And next to it will say invite or that they're already already invited on your page. And you can just click through all of them and invite them to your page. And they will then get a notification on Facebook saying, please, could you like this? Well, do you want to like the Facebook page? And actually I found a lot of them think that they kind of have to do that to. To win the competition. That is how we've grown. Most of our likes is by that one tip. And that was. That's my favorite tip of every. That is how we grow most of them.

That's an awesome one. Yeah, that's a real nice little unknown feature of Facebook that they don't really promote that much. So, yeah, 100%. And again, don't wor if you missed that. We will. During the week, I'll show you a quick little tip on how to do that. But yeah, that's amazing. So, next question. The question that I have down is, when you're running the competition, do you find that you get people sending you messages? Do you find that people start sending you sob stories, start sending you reasons why they should win? And do you have any tips on. On how to deal with the influx of messages? Do you set aside, like, for example, five to 10 minutes on a night to respond or do you just deal with them on the go? Like, how do you best do your time when running a competition like this and doing all the other things?

I make sure initially that I've got enough time that week because it does take a fair bit if you're going to do it properly, which there's no point in doing it if you're not going to do it properly, because at the end of the day you're giving away, I don't know, a one, two night stay. It's money that you're spending, so you want to be getting the most from it. So I make sure that I'm doing it on a week that I know I will have the time to do it. And if I've got the kids at childcare, brilliant. I can do it as and when I can reply to these comments, I can reply to messages, but otherwise I will do it later on. Facebook has stressed me out in the past whereby it says respond to this message to keep up your response rate within an hour. But to be honest, people aren't hugely bothered and I found just waiting that little bit extra. We have had, we do get quite a few sob stories. I always respond to them. That's just as you never know what's going to. Could turn out into a booking, they could pass your details on to other people. So that's often.

That's all right.

Yeah. I always, always respond to every single message and it does go crazy. We get. We get lots of inquiries and a lot of them. I thought someone definitely, if I can, I respond to them straight away. If I can't, then it doesn't bother me. Now putting it towards later in the evening when the kids have gone to bed.

Yeah, that's great. Nick just put in a real good tip there. When you invite people, if you do it off the mobile app instead of the desktop, what it does is it orders it from the people who have not liked your page. So it just means less scrolling, which is a great tip. Linda, do you post Updated info. This is a question during the. For example, there's a photo outside of our property and I can't click on see more to see what you're saying. Do you post updated info? Yeah. So what we try and do. So when you set the competition on the Monday, you're gonna get an influx of likes, comments and shares, so there's gonna be a lot of attention around your page. So if we were to put out a post, say on Wednesday, a separate post, which could be something like check out room number one or check out our property, et cetera, it's going to get a lot of attention simply because people are looking at your post because you put that competition one out. So, yeah, 100%. I wouldn't just focus on that one post during the week, try and have another post going out, something that does sort of sell your property, which would encourage more people to come to it. 100%. And this training I'm going to be showing everybody. So if you've done this before, you've never done this style of competition training before. There's going to be some really new cool things that I'm going to be showing that. If you've signed up to the list, which is boosley.co.uk Facebook Enter your details because I'm sending out pre prep information that will help you now. I've given you two weeks to get prepared for this. If you're just finding out about it now, it's 10 days until we do this. So there's loads of times to get prepar. And I found that the competitions, like, whatever, when you're prepared for it, you have a mailchimp account set up, you've got all the things set up, then they just work so much better. You've got a good image, you've got a good profile, a good cover, they just work so much better instead of just throwing it together. And I want to do it as a group as much as possible. So if we can all do it at the same time, let's say I'm giving you two weeks to box off that week as much as possible. And even if you're fully booked and it's like a full schedule and all the jazz, if you can just prepare it where you can put off a couple of admin jobs, that can wait a week, I say if we're going to invest our time into this and we want to be getting the best results. So that is awesome. So let's chat about results. And I know this may be hard to, like, think back and think back to that time. But can you remember your best ever result in competition like the back of it? How many new likes did you get the reach, do you remember bookings and inquiries?

I can't remember when our best one was, but I know they have improved and I've made a note of what the reach was for the last competition, but I really find that doing it in the hospital, when you run it in the hospitality community and do it into daily bite sized chunks, little videos to follow, we always get a much better response rate because I don't know whether it's the support, it's the whole feeling of it, knowing you're doing it right, we get much better response. So our June, I think was June. You ran it. Last time we did it, we got a reach of nearly 500,000 people, which I'm nearly certain is our top reach. We had an organic reach of about 450,000 and then there was a bit more from paid reach, but we had the shares went crazy. That was 8,000 shares. Likes were over 5,000 and the comments was about three and a half. Three and a half thousand comments as well. So it was, it was incredible. Yeah, definitely. We got, I can't remember I messaged you how many bookings. We got, what the value of bookings was, but we must have got at least five to ten bookings of it. It covered what it cost us. Anyway.

Just to let everybody know that's going to be taking part and if you're watching this live or on the replay, the major, major change that I'm going to be showing you this time around is that always in the past it's been a like and share competition. I'm going to be losing the share aspect of it to enter. Now that doesn't mean that we're not going to get people to share, but to enter the competition now, we're making it easier for people so they only have to like. What we're going to do is we're going to tap into psychology of people and they're just going to share it anyway. But the reason why we're doing this now, this time around is that Facebook are really clamping down on any business pages that is asking user to share to enter a competition. Like I said, the reason why I'm giving you two weeks notice now and make sure that you all check your emails if you've signed up to the training is that I think one of the days I'm going to send to you is about the T's and c's and why it's really important that we get this spot on right now because it'll just make life so much easier when we move to it. But in the testing and the trialing that I've done for this, even though we're not asking for a like and share for the competition, people are still naturally sharing it and your reach is going crazy. Quick question from Sharon. Can you please explain reach compared to likes? This will be a lot easier for me to show you when we get the competition going. But basically when you put a post out, reach is whoever sees it. So right now there is 14 people, 15 people seeing this live right now when it goes in the replay, there's going to be, you know, hundreds of people will see it. Now, just because you like and see it doesn't mean that you're going to like the post or comment on the post or share the post. That is that figure that you can see. So reach is basically how many people see this post, see the initial video at a competition. Like I said, Sharon, I've probably butchered that explanation. But when it comes to the actual video, I will show you more of what these things mean. So if you are watching this, sorry, go on.

Emma, I also wanted to say, although my 5, like I said, 5 million reach, our last competition was, it didn't start like that, only five competitions ago. It wasn't nearly that. So it has grown huge amounts. So obviously people are running competitions and they're not getting nearly that. Just do it, keep stick with it and that's. Your reach will grow to that.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, if you, if you're in a fortunate position. I know Nick Palmer's watching from Crow's Nest. He's got a large following and Emma's got a large following and as few as others have got thousands of following. Obviously your results will be higher than others and if you're starting from a low point of a couple of hundred, but this is why it's important. And the one in June I tested this and trialed this method with Mondyke Shepherdhuts because it's a new business startup over in first I've got maybe 200 followers, but it had again, the method worked. They tripled their following, they got more inquiries, more people on the website. So it does work and you just keep going and that's what we're going to be focusing on and I love the way that we can do this together. Mandy, great question. What's the difference between likes and followers? Nothing. It's just me Saying different words. Likes are followers, followers are likes. It's the same. Same Amanda, thank you very much. Alright, so for everybody that's tuning in, we'll only do this for another couple of minutes before we sign off. We're talking about Facebook competition, chatting to Emma about tactics and tips that we can do during the competition that will make your lives easier, get you more likes. Reach inquiries and bookings. If you've got any questions, final questions now, please post them below. If you've got any advice that you want to share. So if you've done competitions in the past, like Nick is watching just phenomenally well on competitions as well, post them below because this link, this thread is going to be the pre competition advice. So if you've got any questions at all, please comment here. If you want Emma or me or anybody to see it, just tag us in and we'll do our best to answer before it goes live on the 24th. Okay, so the final thing that I want to ask you was down in my pre live questions was when we've done the competition and it's come towards the end and you're about to announce a winner, have you ever created a special offer that you then sent out to your people that have run or entered, took part in the competition and the follow up question to that was has there been any bookings on the back of it? Any advice that you could give if you have created an offer and little tips? Let's talk about that.

Yes, for all the people that didn't win. I mean I always announce the winner on the Facebook post now and also put it on the actual edit the actual host itself because I find that lots of people message afterwards saying about who's won. Yeah but for everyone who hasn't won, I have. Following your advice, we put a special offer. We made a promo code that people could use when booking on our website which would give them 5 or 10% off if they booked. So it was kind of like sorry, you haven't won, but for entering you will get this. Thank you very very much for entering and showing your support. I did 5% the first time. I didn't get anyone booked. I did 10% the second time which is still less than what you're paying booking.comexpedia have you. I did get three people booking using that code. So I also built my email list which I'm sure you'll explain using that competition and they all got that email as well.

That's a really good point that you made when you announce the winner, we get everybody to put it in the comments, but also we need to edit the original post because when you announce the winner, the comments just fly in and people can easily miss it. And just to save you a little bit of headache and having to reply in messages, because I find that when you do these competitions, people really get involved and they want to know who's won and you'll get messages. So edit the posts on the Friday or the Saturday when you finish it. And in the top line Asterix is updated. The winner is Boom. And it just helps you massively. We're not having to respond to all the questions. Nick Palmer. I'm too stingy to give 10% off. That's 100% fine. You're a Yorkshireman. I wouldn't expect anything less. All right, Gail. Despite doing all I was expected, I couldn't get FB to send to audience I wanted. And okay, I can't read that because anything c more on the mobile app I can't read. But don't worry, if you've done this before in the past and you felt like you haven't got any engagement or anything back from it, this new method I'm very confident will work for everybody. Make sure that if you are going to take part on the 24th and you have signed up with the link, which I'll put it in the comments below. Afterwards, you check your email, check your inbox, check your junk box just in case it's gone into.