In their effort to drive more conversations in the News Feed and to make it easier for pages to create promotions, Facebook announced big news this week — updated Page Terms to make it easier for businesses to create promotions on Facebook.
With these updated terms page owners can now run promotions on Fan Page timelines and source winners from commenters and people who like certain status updates.
And while this is great for page owners, the inevitable question comes when it’s time choose, who is the winner?
Certainly it has to be a fair promotion, even if there are thousands of likes on a post. For years prior to the quarantine of promotions to third-party applications, page owners used the infamous Random Number Generator to often times pick winners on their page.
But even being purely random, the Random Number Generator is pretty limited and not really the most comprehensive solution. If you’re a page who has millions of fans with hundreds of thousands of individual likes and comments, this isn’t really scaleable.
What Is The Solution?
Enter FanpageKarma.com’s “Good Luck Fairy” solution.
Put simply, the “Good Luck Fairy” detects the winner of a Facebook promotion through randomly generating winners from a number of different categories including:
- A winner from all who liked a Page post
- A winner from all who commented on a Page post
- A winner from all who liked and commented on a Page post
- The comment with the most likes
Picking a winner is easy, simply grab the URL for the update you want to find a winner for, and enter it into the Fanpage Karma site here, then you’ll be presented a number of different options that you can use to pick a winner. You can
We tested it out on our Social Fresh Facebook page by entering the URL for the post below:
Here are our results:
As you can see, it’s a nice and easy way to pull out a winner for more advanced contests on Facebook.
Not only do they give suggested winners, but they’ll also show you the avatars of the people who have “entered” into the contest through participating. This is great for identifying people who are active on your page and on contests.
We first noticed CruiseDeals.com using this on their page already, as you can see below.
Other Great Solutions
It has only been a few days since the rule changes, but there are already 3 tools with solutions to this contest winner selection need. Woobox and ShortStack have also introduced their own versions of ways to choose winning fans at random (thanks Mari Smith for the tip).
The Fanpage Karma solution seems to be the easiest and very comprehensive. The Woobox and ShortStack tools work well, but require a login. Since Fanpage Karma only needs the post URL, it wins for now on having the least friction. If you are already using Woobox or ShortStack, we would recommend using their solutions. Both are great tools.
Have you started running any promotions on the timeline since the terms changed this week? Let us know in the comments.