What Are the Best Social Media Apps for Hosting a Facebook Sweepstakes?
Hosting a sweepstakes through an app you can upload to your Facebook page is an easy and effective way to gain followers, build excitement for your brand and grow your presence on the top social networking site in the world.
To do so, you’ll want to host the sweepstakes with a tried and true third-party app. There are several to choose from and our firm has taken several of them for a test drive. Without bias (well, maybe a little), we’ll share with you some of the best ones out there.
Woobox: We love Woobox because it offers high-functionally and easy to use features. It doesn’t hurt that it is very inexpensive at about $30 per month. It enables fan-gating (where only people who “like” your page can enter the sweepstakes), which is effective in helping you gain new fans through the promotion. It also offers an easy-to-use interface and the opportunity to go super-viral. Your fans can earn extra entries for getting other fans to enter the sweepstakes – taking your sweepstakes viral more quickly than other apps. One thing we didn’t like was that once you enter the sweeps, you cannot see the sweepstakes page again. Instead it invites you to share it with friends over and over again. If you just wanted to share the link with someone outside of Facebook, it makes it difficult to do, but otherwise a terrific sweepstakes app for the money and well worth looking at.
Wildfire: Wildfire may have started the sweepstakes app craze (at least it did for us). Wildfire offers the highest level of functionality and an awesome entry form unmatched by the competitors. The entry form allows you to ask all sorts of questions and allows you to collect lots of great data. However, the app comes with a heftier price tag than the others – with a month-long campaign running you over $100. You have to be a white-label client (very very expensive) to be able to fan-gate, whereas it’s included with Woobox and North Social. Wildfire also helps companies offer highly custom and complex campaigns, making it the choice app for sophisticated and deep-pocketed companies.
North Social: North Social offers a suite of apps for one price, which is fantastic and cost-effective. You not only buy the sweepstakes application, but several other apps that allow you to put your Facebook page on speed-dial. We love that about North Social – however – getting a sweepstakes up and running on your Facebook page is a bit complex, which is why we don’t use it as often anymore. You have to create the entry form on its email-blast platform, which will take you 30+ more minutes to learn. The form also is very limited in what you can ask. When it’s time to select a winner, you have to scroll through the entries and come up with your own random system for selecting one, whereas Wildfire and Woobox will randomly select winners for you. It also doesn’t all entrants to earn extra entries like Woobox does. That said, North Social’s variety and all-inclusive nature is highly attractive and worthwhile if you’re open to a longer learning curve and don’t mind a few kinks or two.
Another application we’ve heard about but haven’t tried is Offerpop. Have you tried it? It’s next on our to-do list – when we try it we’ll update this post.
You can find other sweepstakes apps and more at AppBistro – a great source to help you find the Facebook app you need including apps on how to display documents on your Facebook page, free Welcome pages and more.
Please let us know if there are other apps worthwhile to experiment with. We’re up for learning new things! We can also help manage your Facebook marketing campaign - contact us to learn more!
You might like our article about "18 Ways to Successfully Promote Your Facebook Sweepstakes or Contest."