Spooky Good Halloween Facebook Contest Ideas for Retailers

With 7 out of 10 Americans celebrating Halloween every year,
October presents a perfect opportunity for retailers to dip into holiday excitement
and fun with Facebook contests. By aligning your store with the celebration,
you’re bound to gain a slice of the $7 billion annual Halloween spending
(pumpkin) pie.

Caption Contest
To put some spark and fun into your social channels during the holidays, retailers
can run a caption contest, where customers write funny captions for the image
you provide. You could even post different pictures each week or every other week,
to have multiple winners. This would drive more people back to the site – both
to see the new pictures and captions and to get additional entries into the
prizes. Obviously, if you can get photos that are relevant to your brand it’s
even better, but don’t try to force it. A bad brand connection is worse than
none at all.

Spooky Sweepstakes
One of the easiest contests to run is a sweepstakes contest, where participants
are randomly chosen after entry. Fans enter by liking or commenting on the post
which increases engagement on your page and exposes the post to a wider range
of audience by showing up in their friends’ Facebook feed. The more likes and
comments the post gets, the more visible it will be. We suggest amplifying the post’s reach by using targeted Facebook ads (promoted
posts).

An easy contest to run would be simply asking your customers
Halloween related questions. Although this is less related to retail, it is fun
and something a lot of users can relate to in October. For instance, you could integrate
your product by saying “Holidays are great time to have a party and gather in
your living room watch a family Halloween movie. Tell us your favorite for a
chance to win a gift card to help with your party.” And give them 4 choices (i.e. Ghost Busters, Nightmare
before Christmas, Beetlejuice or The Adams Family) – then they put their answer
in the comments A, B, C or D – and let the debate begin! This will get people
to want to get others to vote to help prop up their favorite to win. It will
also emphasize that you want to be part of the customers’ holidays during
celebration. The winner can then go to the retailer and get a holiday gift to
make their home better for Halloween with their new gift card. Other
ideas: Who are you dressing up as for Halloween? Which Haunted House
are you going to? What is the best candy for Halloween?

Costume Contest
Another fun idea is to have a Halloween costume
contest. PetSmart is already running one through an App: Monster Cute. You can
submit a photo of your pet in their Halloween costume and get your friends to
vote for your chance to win one of dozens of prizes including the Grand Prize
of $10,000 and a year's supply of Canine Greenies Dental Chews!

This is a good tactic by PetSmart since they’re engaging the customer
through what they love: their pets. And
by running the contest through an app, they will capture email addresses and other
customer information, helping them build their database for further marketing
efforts. By getting friends to vote on the pet pictures (friends and friends of
friends), the contest is guaranteed to engage a lot more people than just those
who already know and like PetSmart. The $10,000 prize warrants that more people
will enter the contest even though it is running through an app.

Alternatively you could run a costume contest (or costume kids contest) by
telling your followers to post the pictures of themselves in their Halloween
customers on your Facebook wall and then
put the pictures in an album dedicated to the event. American Apparel did this
last year and drove the viewers to check out their Halloween outfits in the
process (Cha-Ching!). This type of contest will boost likes and engagement with
your followers, making sure that you can reach more people and grow your
Facebook following.

Other Ideas: House decoration contest Have people decorate their homes and post pictures to your Facebook page. If there is a way to incorporate your product or product category into the decorating ideas, all the better.

What kind of contest are you thinking of running? How does
Halloween effect your business?

Dmitri Pivtorak, scaring up some social marketing ideas.