Tag Archives: facebook

Made another contest app for a client

Sometimes I make contest apps for Facebook for my clients at work. This one is using a template and looks nicer than some others I’ve made in the past (I’d used the client’s colour scheme previously, which didn’t really look good in this format). The picture slider feature is pretty cool, I’m probably going to use those more often in the future.

Toplock ALT Tower app contest

 

The contest is for TopLock Locksmiths in Northcote who are a 24 hour locksmith company servicing all around Melbourne. The contest is for one of their clients ALT Tower Serviced Apartments, who are one of their clients. The winner (automatically generated from a database of entries) will get a night away in a luxury apartment and can do whatever they want in the city and come back and stay there for the night. I think the contest should do well as it should appeal to most people, everyone wants to stay somewhere fancy every now and then right?

For some weird reason I had a lot of problems getting the Facebook ads to work. It appears as if the filtering for ads on Facebook isn’t very well organised. I kept getting error messages that made no sense to how  was running the contest, I made appropriate changes to remove use of the word “Like” from anywhere (their filter seemed to think I was telling people to “Like” the page to enter, when I had said you must like the page to be able to enter). Though I’m still sure I hadn’t done anything wrong (Like gating to have fans enter a contest app is the correct way to run a contest rather than those dodgy “Like this photo to enter” contests that most small businesses do which actually violate Facebook’s terms and conditions). I also kept getting emails when my campaigns were rejected that showed a blank space where the error message was meant to be, so it was hard to fix. In the end I made an appeal to Facebook and showed them that their filter was screwing me around and they approved my ad. Still quite sure this was an error by them the whole time as I’ve made many ads similar to this in the past without a problem.

The thing that confuses me most is that how could a link to an app be confused with “liking this picture to enter the comp” style contests that other people do?  Oh well hopefully Facebook fix how their filter works. The contest framework I used is quite popular with Facebook.

Why are the marketing departments of some companies scared of Social Media?

I have volunteered on committees that my local council pay for at least 5 years now and the entire time, we have been asking for official Social Media presence for those organisations for that entire time. Myspace completely disappeared in that time and now Facebook is the biggest thing, but by the time they actually get around to approving anything people might not even be using that one anymore. I discuss how these sort of organisations could greatly benefit from social media sites / online advertising here.

It is a real shame that waste so much money on printed newsletters which I assume few people actually read. Similar budgets could be targeted to the correct people online. It would be like shooting fish in a barrel. I find out about nearly everything that interests me via Facebook or Twitter. I actually get annoyed whenever I get mail that isn’t a parcel from eBay or something. I don’t even open half things sent to me unless it’s something important like a phone bill.

 

I love that you can schedule posts for Facebook Pages now

I run a few Facebook Pages for myself as well as some of my clients. Having to actually be online at certain times to post things is really annoying. I am aware of third party tools that let you do that too, but I don’t really like it when Facebook indicates that this post has been posted via Hootsuite or whatever else.

Now you can actually schedule the posts in advance from within Facebook, I’m amazed they never did this sooner. It is pretty simple to do. I wrote a little article about it a while ago, you can find it here. It is great because some days I can get the rest of the week’s posts ready in one go. Sure I may have to jump on again later to post some other news as it occurs, but I’d usually log into each page a few times a week anyway, so that’s not a problem.