Last week, I asked you for help with an experiment to help me to work out which ways of sharing a competition on Facebook are likely to actually be SEEN by the page owner wad which weren't.
Bear in mind that the results below ONLY APPLY IF YOUR PROFILE IS SET TO "PUBLIC". As I said at the start of the experiment, although wasn't 100% certain of it then, if your profile isn't completely public, Like and Share competitions are not for you.
I have deliberated, cogitated and digested and here are the results:
1. I asked you to share publicly on your own timeline. This works a treat - I can see every share.
2. I asked you to share publicly on a friend's timeline. This too works pretty well - every share but one (and Facebook wouldn't tell me which one) showed up, whether you had shared with my personal Facebook account or somebody else,. It's worth bearing this in mind if you see a competition you know a friend would really like to enter. If they aren't online when you share on your own timeline, it may have dropped off the bottom of the screen by the time they log in, and then they'll miss it, but sharing on their timeline means they get a notification and won't miss anything.
3. Sharing in a private message to a friend. This surprised me - although 34 people said that they shared by using the share button, as page owner I could only see ONE of them. Only use this option for telling a friend about a competition you don't actually want to enter yourself!
4. Sharing on your own timeline but just with friends rather than publicly. Again, I saw every single share, whether or not you are a friend of my personal account.
5. Sharing on your own timeline but set to "only me". There were 28 clicks on the share button, but I could only see 20 of the people who had shared. I presume the other 8 had profiles that were not fully public. If you are worried about annoying non comping friends and family, sharing with "only me" with your profile fully public could be the way forward. Check, though, whether the promoter has specified that your share should be public. They sometimes do - after all, the whole point of them running a competition is to get some advertising!
6. Sharing by tagging a friend in a comment. There were 66 comments - and of those I could only see the most recent 25. And I was only shown 5 shares. So this is definitely NOT a way to enter a Like and Share comp, your sharing MUST involve the share button in one of the ways listed above. If the page owner asks you to tag people in a comment in order to enter, remember that unless they are monitor comments as they go along, they may only see the last handful of entries before the competition closes.
Don't forget that none of this applies when you are entering through an app - if you are doing it that way, the app will be programmed to collect any shares that it asks for, so just go ahead and follow the instructions. But if you DO want to enter Like and Share competitions, this research might help you to make your entries more effective.
Good luck - and if you've seen this post linked from the Grapevine Facebook page, how about giving it a Like and Share???
Interesting results Jane
ReplyDeleteThat's really interesting, so much for page owners not seeing shares just with friends. Surprised about the Only Me option, could you tell it was only with themselves?
ReplyDeleteGreat to see the results, an interesting read :-)
ReplyDeleteVery interesting, but surely it is against Facebook rules to ask people to share anyway?
ReplyDelete"3. Promotions may be administered on Pages or within apps on Facebook. Personal Timelines must not be used to administer promotions (ex: “share on your Timeline to enter” or “share on your friend's Timeline to get additional entries” is not permitted)."
Indeed it is, as you would see if you had read the original post to which this is a follow up. The fact that it is against Facebook terms doesn't stop it from happening.
DeleteDon't they say 'rules are meant to be broken? xx
DeleteCan a company see all shares or only a handful of the last ones? Do you think it matters when you enter a competition? At the start? The end? Or that you have a better chance the more you share?
ReplyDeleteAnswers on a postcard please. :D
It's a bit hard to tell, as I got around 30 shares for each post and I've heard some people say that companies can only see the 100 most recent shares, but I didn't have enough to test it. To be on the safe side, I'd aim for towards the end if possible but not stress about it too much. As for the number of times you share, I think that depends on how they choose the winner. If they are being really unscientific and just scrolling through the shares, just stopping at random, then the more often you share, the better your chances. But if they are doing it properly and entering them into a spreadsheet and using a random number generator to pick, then they'll probably only enter each name once. That's more likely if they've asked you to share as well as doing something else like liking or commenting, as they will want to use a spreadsheet to check that entrants have done everything they were asked to.
DeleteThanks Jane. :)
DeleteI didn't see your experiment but I have a question. Were you going by the amount of shares fb told you there were or did you have a known amount of people who were involved in your experiment? As I too set up a page and did an experiment but got differing results from you
ReplyDeleteI asked everyone who shared to also comment, so I could see whether FB showed me all the shares or not.
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