Do you want to boost engagement on your website while increasing your Facebook followers?
If your answer is yes, then you need to run a Facebook contest. A giveaway can help direct users’ attention to your Facebook page and help you get more likes / followers on Facebook.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to properly add a Facebook giveaway in WordPress to boost engagement and get more likes / views.
Why Run a Facebook Giveaway in WordPress?
Facebook’s policies do not allow you to giveaway prizes for getting likes.
However, these policies do not restrict you from sending visitors to your Facebook page or group from your website.
Running a giveaway on your WordPress website enables you to point users to your Facebook page, which ultimately results in more followers and engagement on your Facebook page.
Giveaways also allow you to add other engagement metrics simultaneously such as asking users to join your email newsletter, viewing your Instagram profile, watching your YouTube video, and more.
Giveaways and contests can go viral due to the social sharing actions, which increase your reach and help you find new users.
That being said, let’s take a look at how to easily run a Facebook giveaway in WordPress to get more likes and engagements.
Running a Facebook Giveaway in WordPress
For this tutorial, we’ll be using RafflePress. It is the best WordPress giveaway plugin on the market.
RafflePress makes it easy to design your giveaway using a drag and drop builder. You can add prize photo, choose dates, select winners randomly, and use templates to quickly launch new giveaway campaigns.
It comes with social actions to direct your users to your social media channels including Facebook. You can make an action mandatory to join a giveaway. It also comes with social logins and integrates with all popular email marketing platforms.
RafflePress was co-founded by WPBeginner’s founder, Syed Balkhi, to help us boost engagement on our own site, and it works really well.
With that said, let’s start your first Facebook giveaway campaign.
Step 1. Creating Your First Facebook Giveaway Campaign
The first thing you need to do is install and activate the RafflePress plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
You can also use the RafflePress lite plugin for free, but for the sake of this tutorial, we will be showing the Pro version.
Upon activation, the plugin will add a new menu item labeled RafflePress to your WordPress admin sidebar.
Clicking on it will take you to the plugin’s settings, and you’ll be asked to enter your license key. You can find this information under your account on the RafflePress website.
After that, you need to visit RafflePress » Add New to launch the giveaway builder.
First, you need to provide a title for your giveaway and then choose a template. RafflePress comes with several pre-made templates for specific campaigns including one for growing your Facebook page.
This will launch the giveaway builder with select actions users need to perform to join the contest. You can still add / remove actions to your giveaway (more on this later).
By default, the template will add login with the Facebook button, visit us on Facebook, and View a Facebook post or video actions.
Let’s start customizing this giveaway by adding our Prize details. Simply click on the edit icon next to the Prize title from the left column.
First, you need to provide a title for the prize. After that, you can provide a brief description and add a picture of the prize.
Note: Need help finding prize ideas? Here are 105 proven contest prize ideas for viral giveaways.
Just below the title, you’ll be able to select the start and end dates for the giveaway.
Step 2. Adding More Actions to Your Facebook Giveaway
Now that you have done the basic set up for the giveaway, let’s add some more ways for users to join the giveaway.
You need to switch to the ‘Actions’ tab in the giveaway builder and start adding actions to your giveaway.
For example, you can ask users to join your email list, view your Instagram, Pinterest, or Twitter profile, send a Tweet, visit a page or a WooCommerce product on your store, and so on.
Simply click on an action and add it to your giveaway. The builder will then show you specific settings for that particular action.
From here you need to provide a title for the action which users will see on the action button in your giveaway.
After that, you need to assign a value to the action. The value is the number of entries users will earn for performing an action. For example, if you are trying to get more likes on Facebook, then you would want to give more weight to your Facebook actions.
Below that, you have a choice to make an action mandatory. Users will not be able to participate in your Facebook contest if they don’t perform the mandatory action.
Finally, you’ll have action-specific settings such as providing your Facebook page URL, Facebook group link, or connecting to your email service.
Step 3: Design your Facebook Giveaway to Stand out
RafflePress gives you easy to use design tools to customize the appearance of your giveaway campaigns.
Simply switch to the Design tab, and you will see options to choose a layout, button color, and fonts for your giveaway.
If you plan to use the giveaway as a standalone landing page vs embedding it in a blog post, page, or a sidebar widget, then you can also choose the page background color.
RafflePress allows you to add your giveaway to any WordPress post or page. You can also create a custom landing page for your Facebook giveaway contest by using your favorite WordPress page builder and simply add your giveaway widget there (more on this later).
Step 4. Fine Tuning Your Giveaway Settings
Now that your giveaway looks great, let’s review its settings for the last time. Switch to the ‘Settings’ tab under the builder to see various options.
They are all very self-explanatory, but we’ll go through them one by one.
First, you need to click on the ‘General’ tab and review the options.
If you wanted to create a standalone Facebook giveaway contest page, then you can do that here. Provide a name for your campaign page under the Page Permalink option without any spaces.
You can also show and hide the number of entries, contest winners, and the powered by link.
Next, switch to the ‘Giveaway Rules’ tab. This is where you’ll list the rules for joining the giveaway. You can start by clicking on the ‘Generate Rules’ button to automatically generate rules using a sample template.
If you want participants to confirm their email address, then switch to the email verification tab. From here, turn on the email verification feature and configure the confirmation email options.
RafflePress allows you to track users who have successfully completed giveaway actions. You can do so by adding tracking scripts under the ‘Success tracking’ tab. For example, you can add your Google Analytics script here or a Facebook retargeting pixel code here.
If you want to redirect users to a specific page, then switch to the Success redirect tab and enter the URL of the page where you want to send users.
Lastly, you can turn the social login feature On/Off from the social logins tab. Turning it off will disable the login with Facebook button on your giveaway campaign.
Your giveaway is now ready to be launched. Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button at the top right corner to save all your settings.
Step 5. Add Your Facebook Giveaway to a WordPress Post or Page
RafflePress makes it very easy to display your giveaway anywhere on your WordPress website.
You can simply edit a post or page or create a new one and then add the RafflePress block to the block editor.
After that, you need to select the giveaway you created earlier. RafflePress block will now load a preview of your giveaway right inside the editor.
You can also add your giveaway to a sidebar or any other place using the shortcode.
Simply edit your giveaway and switch to the ‘Publish’ tab in the builder interface. From here, click on the shortcode option and RafflePress will show the shortcode you can use.
Copy the shortcode and edit the post or page where you want to display the giveaway. Simply paste the shortcode inside the post editor and you are done.
You can also add the shortcode to a sidebar widget. Go to Appearance » Widgets page and then add the ‘Text’ widget to your sidebar.
You can now paste your shortcode inside the widget settings and click on the save button to store it. After that, you can preview your website to see it in action.
Step 6. Promoting Your Facebook Giveaway
You’ll need to start promoting your giveaway to build anticipation before the contest begins. We recommend planning ahead to give yourself enough time to publicize the campaign.
Here are a few things you can do to build anticipation for a successful giveaway campaign.
- Send an email to the subscribers of your email newsletter.
- Announce the event on social channels: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and more.
- Run a paid advertising campaign (not required but it does help).
- Reach out to influencers, bloggers, forums, and communities to get the word out.
By putting in all the hard work before the event increases the chances of your campaign to get viral. It will also increase the return on investment in terms of Facebook likes, followers, and new subscribers you’ll get for your website.
Step 7. Announcing The Giveaway Winners
The best part about RafflePress is that it automates the whole process. Your giveaway will automatically end once it reaches the end time and date you have set.
After that, you can automatically choose the lucky winners through a random draw.
Simply go to RafflePress » Giveaways page and click on the ‘Need Winners’ link next to your giveaway.
Next, you’ll see a list of users who participated in the contest. You need to click on the Pick winner button at the top and select the number of users who can win and whether you want to allow unverified emails to win.
Click on the ‘Choose winner now’ button to continue.
RafflePress will now randomly select a winner for your giveaway.
You can now click on the Email Winner link to send the winner an email about how they can claim their prize.
We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add a Facebook giveaway in WordPress to boost engagement. You may also want to see these actionable tips that you can use to get more traffic to your WordPress website.
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