What's the best way to share a competition entry on Facebook?

Like and share competitions - they are everywhere on Facebook, aren't they? And even though they don't strictly comply with Facebook's revised guidelines for running competitions, it's pretty hard to avoid them. Even the most determined non-sharer finds themselves drawn to join in.

So you've decided to share a competition. But how do you know the promoter can see that you've shared it? Well, first of all, if your profile is set to anything other than public, it's not worth entering as they won't see it, so you can stop reading here and go and enter some different types of competition instead. Or make your profile public then come back here and read on!

My own understanding of sharing to enter a competition is that you need to click on the word Share under the post, select "On your own timeline" from the top drop down menu in the share box and "public" from the bottom one, and publish your share that way. But I'm seeing shares done in lots of other ways - people are sharing onto my timeline, into my private message inbox, and by tagging me in comments. So I'm starting to wonder what exactly the page owner sees.

Luckily I have a page myself - the Grapevine page.  So I'm going to run a little experiment on there. I'll post a series of updates and ask you to share each one in a different way. Please read the instructions on each one and follow them exactly, then after sharing, comment with "done" (or anything else you care to say!) to let me know you've shared.

At the end of the experiment, I'll check the comments against the list of shares that Facebook shows me, to see which of them tallies up best - and with any luck, we'll then know whether any one way of sharing is better then another!

I did think of offering a prize to thank you all for helping with the research, but then I decided that wouldn't be fair, because if some people used the sharing methods that turn out to be less effective then I wouldn't see their entries. So your reward will be the knowledge that when the results are in, you'll know what the most effective way of sharing is to make sure your entry is seen.

I'll be posting the updates over the course of this weekend, and will collate the results on February 1st.