Running a contest to increase Facebook Likes
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I recently read about a well known company giving away a large prize and offering anyone a chance to win by Liking their Facebook Page.
Has there been any statements provided by Google on how they view the attempt to increase Facebook Likes through contests.
Or if they have not revealed anything, what do you think Google's approach would be based on their history?
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Google will not really care about FB likes. Not even FB cares too much about artificially inflating likes.
Almost all FB competitions attracting likes are short lived and hardly ever engage your brand with the user and there will be zero stickiness. Consider the FB likes a vanity number and nothing else. If a company has no social engagement on the FB wall (i.e. no shares or comments), then it's not worth it to run a campaign.
I would rather look at an all-inclusive social campaign where you stretch across Twitter, FB, G+ and Pinterest. We had good engagement from users with our photo- or Pinterest competitions and actually saw backlinks and referrals growing from this.
Also look at engaging new / existing users on your site and/or blog - this will have more value than just artificially growing some meaningless number.
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What is your goal of this contest? If you are just trying to get more followers on facebook why are you worried about google? Contests using app like wildfire snapp app or raffle copter as well as promoting it with ads etc are a great way to get your community started and is safe from harming you or your rankings.
If you are asking about links generated by such a contest or the ranking effects of social shares from google's prospective as long as you aren't doing anything spammy or underhanded and have real market goals in mind you should be fine.
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As long as the contest legitimately engages a company's Facebook followers, I can't imagine why it would be a problem. Contests and giveaways are great ways to engage people. The one thing I would be wary of wouldn't so much be Google but Facebook itself. They have recently embarked on a campaign to eliminate "Fake" followers. If your contest produces a lot of fake follows, then you might see your number of likes inflate while people are entering, but then drop down again after the promotion if Facebook determines that alot of those new followers weren't real people with genuine FB accounts.
Disclaimer: No one, including myself can predict what Google will or won't do. (sorry, I aways feel the need to put that in when answering a question about "predicting" what Google might or might not penalize).
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