Facebook Contest Manager is Facebook’s contest administrative feature, made available to Facebook users to help them manage contests staged on Facebook. With this feature, Facebook users can create, personalize and monitor contests.
There are several contest management apps that can be used to administer contests set up on Facebook. In no particular order, some of the best such apps are;
- Heyo
- Wishpond
- AgoraPulse
- Shortstack
- Woobox
- Easy Promos
A. Heyo
Heyo is a more visual contest builder, compared to its peers. This makes it quite easy to set up contests tailored to meet your needs. Heyo provides template recommendations which cut across various industries. On top of that, Heyo offers a great level of personalisation through its editable templates. The icing on the cake is, that no code is required to carry out any of the processes required to set up a contest.
Heyo could be considered a “drag and drop” Facebook contest app used by most businesses to promote engagement and amass likes. These two, when put together, can fuel purchases and increase sales. Heyo is targeted at entrepreneurs and small and medium-sized businesses.
With Heyo, you get a 7-day full-featured free trial, after which you’re charged $30/month or $300/year. Building contests is still allowed after the free trial period elapses, but you won’t be able to publish them. Also, Heyo places no limits on Facebook fans or page traffic, therefore, you don’t incur extra costs as you become more successful.
B. Wishpond
This is a contest-building and promotion app that allows its users to create and manage unlimited campaigns while offering a wide variety of tools to help customise and add features to contests. Some of those tools include landing page creators, retargeting Ads, email marketing automation, etc. Wishpond also has templates.
Wishpond offers a 14-day free trial option, in which users have to pay $19 per month to continue using the app. To use Wishpond’s lead database feature, though, you would have to pay $44/month. The decision to pay that much is totally up to you. At times, your ROI on Wishpond may be such that going the extra mile for the lead database feature is completely rational.
C. AgoraPulse
AgoraPulse may be considered an all-in-one contest manager app, seeing as it allows users to create apps, qualify, engage, manage contests and even analyse results with its ROI calculation dashboard. AgoraPulse allows you to do all of these with ease.
For all its offerings, AgoraPulse charges $39/month for two pages earmarked at 50k fans.
D. Shortstark
Shortstack is one of the most comprehensive contest management apps. It offers a wide variety of features to choose from. There’s a bit of learning and getting used to what users have to do, but once done, you realise you get to exercise a lot of control over things.
It helps to create contests, campaigns, apps and landing pages. Business owners could also create their very own custom tabs and contests on fan pages. Photos or videos can be added to promotions.
Shortstark offers flexibility. Not that you have to, but if you’re ok with getting your hands a little dirty and doing some coding, there’s provision to design with CSS/HTML. Also, if you wish to for some reason, promote your contest with QR codes, or run campaigns that show different content to users in different countries, Shortstack is guaranteed to grant you that level of control.
Charges for Shortstack are based on a combination of features and audience size. For instance, if you have more than 30,000 fans, you’re not allowed to use the $30/month plan. Instead, you’d have to go for the $75/month full package plan.
E. Woobox
Another popular app to use for your contests is Woobox. Though it may be a tad more difficult to use than the aforementioned apps, it comes with most of the features they come with too.
Woobox has different selections of content types to choose from. It also enables Facebook ad creation.
Its pricing is a bit more complicated than the rest. Charges are based on a combination of features, the number of promotions you can run per month, Facebook audience size and the number of pages.
F. Easy Promos
Easy Promos is another good choice to go for. It is free and provides three different package levels. As a user, you weigh your options and go for the one which best suits your needs for setting up an effective contest, quickly.