Quite a few years ago online marketers realized the power and potential of facebook users doing the marketing work for them. They created various different contests in which the person with the most “likes” won. It was a win-win situation in that the competitor walked away with a sweet prize and the company increased their brand awareness and number of facebook page ‘likes’ by hundreds if not thousands. And, as with all new, different, great ideas, it worked really really well at first.
But, 2 years ago, I was involved in one of these contests and my opinion of them quickly changed. Facebook likes were just a component of a much bigger, 3 round competition and during the first round it was great. My team publicized it all over facebook, posted on our walls, messaged our friends, posted on our friends’ walls…and we won with over 1000 likes. But then round 2 came along and by round 3 of the competition we realized that our friends were sick and tired of us spamming their facebook trying to get them to ‘like’ the content.
A ‘like’ took not even 1 second of their time but by this point in the competition we had people so annoyed that they were unliking content they previously had liked. We as competitors understood this and sympathized with our friends…but the company for some reason didn’t. They did’t realize that these facebook contests that were suppose to increase brand awareness were actually destroying their brand reputation.
Now, quite a few years after the first contest launched, companies need to realize that the “like” contest fad is dying down fast and attempting to launch one now could prove far more harmful to the brand than beneficial.
Someone came up with this idea…anyone can come up with a new one!