Polly Barnfield shows how Edwards Place, a fish-and-chip shop in Hereford, ran a social media competition that pulled 600 likes and 700 comments from a 3,000-follower page. The entry process was simple: like, follow, share, tag a friend. She walks through why competitions work and how to respond to participants without losing professionalism.
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In this video, we're going to be talking about competitions and how running a competition could really boost engagement with your business on social media. To do this, we're going to be taking a look at Edwards Place, a family run fish and chip shop based in Hereford. And we'll see how a competition that they hosted was really fantastic for their engagement. If you have any questions at all during the video, please do make use of the blue button down at the bottom right of your browser. So here we are, we're looking at Edwards Place on Facebook here. And within their Facebook page there is definitely very much a community feel. They are absolutely right to be focusing their efforts here. A fish and chip shop, well, it's not necessarily, but not exclusively, not going to have many snazzy product shots. So Facebook is traditionally an arena where people are comfortable, commenting and sharing and generally helping to build a community. So top marks, Edwards Place there. But competitions, that's what we're here to talk about. So competitions are a great engagement tactic and they can be used to grow followers, improve reach. Particularly if you are running a competition in collaboration with another business or organization effectively. By doing so, you're posting to a much larger audience. So the scope is there within a collaboration to reach a much wider range of people than you would do ordinarily. But even if you are running a competition solo, they can be a fantastic mechanism for growth. So why run a competition well? Okay, yes, it can grow, but why? Well, competitions are something that audiences do respond to really well. When it comes to your audience, competitions on social media evoke joy, generally fun, just general good feelings. And you want people to feel good because then they'll want to engage with you. Most competitions are celebrated something, so perhaps you've reached a milestone in your business or it's just because it could be because it's Thursday. It could be because you've reached the end of a difficult month. It could just be a time when you need a boost, your business needs a boost, and you know or you know that your customers need a boost. Alternatively, you could be celebrating something. And that is what Edwards Place have run their competition for. They're celebrating a birthday. Very exciting. They're six. And how are they celebrating it? They're only giving away a telly, which what a good idea. This is just a really, really lovely example of a celebratory competition because it's all about giving back as we place our honoring their customers and they're thanking their customers for choosing them for their fish and chip needs. It's really Emphatic. Look at these capital letters here. They're so keen that the salient points of their post come across and it's simply done, but perfectly done. They want their customers to know that they are truly appreciated and it is wonderful to see your support means the world. So to enter this particular competition, they've made it very simple. Just make sure that you are liking the page, you're following them, you share the post and you tag in a friend who probably also does love Edward's Place. And unsurprisingly, it's received absolutely fantastic engagement. Look, over 600 likes, over 700 comments, over 700 shares. It's absolutely wonderful. And remember, they have 3,000 followers on this page, so it really has been broadcast to a much wider audience than they would have ordinarily for their posts. So when it comes to competitions, in addition to asking people to like, comment and tag, you can ask people to share their posts on their feeds, which they will have done here for this Facebook post, but you can also ask people to share on their stories or if you're on Twitter, you could ask people to retweet. But regardless of the competition that you're hosting, you need to ensure that you are fully engaging with your followers because you're going to have a mix of old people, old customers and new customers, new followers participating in the competition. So you need to make sure that they feel valued. So let's have a little look here on maybe at just how easy it is to engage with the comments using your maybe engaged tab. So I've come to my dashboard and if I hover here in engagement, you can see it's blue. I'm in comments here. So, so easy. So I've come here to a comment that we've received on a Facebook post. You can see, you can like it, you can reply, you can assign the to another member of a team, you can bookmark it. By using maybe to engage, you can be confident that you will always, always respond using your Facebook business page. There is absolutely no concern that you'll accidentally comment or like a post as yourself on your personal account. It is stress free and that is not always the case for engaging directly on Facebook. So if you use this tool, you'll know you'll always kind of maintain those professional boundaries. That said though, if you do want to view the post again on Facebook, you can just click here on View Post and it will take you to it. You think, oh, this is the post that people are commenting on. So this post here, we've got a comment from a company. Nice and simple. You can see the engagements that you have done in return. So you can like it, you can comment, and you can hide it again if you need to. Simple. Super, super simple. I hope that was useful. Don't forget to put any questions that you may have in the blue box at the bottom of your screen because that connects you to us 247 and we love to help.
