Will we penalized for using social media contests to gain fans/followers in the future?

[airnwater]

To help build up my company's website, we've been making a huge push in social media and to gain followers on our social pages, we've recently been running a couple of contests. So far it's been a great success - more traffic to the social media pages and more traffic to the website.  We are considering making the contests a regular part of our social media & SEO strategy. In the past, our social media strategy has relied completely on "organic" likes (no incentives to follow our company's page) and posted content articles, pictures, etc. In the past month or so, we've began to use giveaway contests as a way to gain followers. Since focusing more on running contests, we've seen a huge increase in actively on our social media pages. We've continued to regularly post content articles, interesting pictures, etc, during the contests, but haven't see the same level of engagement that we do with the contest posts. Right now, it's looking like there is no down-side to running the contests as we're seeing an increase in traffic on the social pages, getting some additional traffic to posts and on our site, but before we start to completely commit to this strategy, I have a couple of questions:

• Is there a reason we shouldn't continue to run these contest to increase fans and interaction?
• How likely is it that Google will penalize us in the future for gaining followers through contests (instead of "organic" followers that followed us without an incentive)?
• There are some fans/followers that are serial contest entrants and are always entering a contest - could having too many of these fans raise a red flag for Google and the other search engines?
• How often is too often to be running a social media contest?

Basically, I want to make sure that we are using social media as a long term SEO tool and are setting ourselves up to be successful in the future and not get penalized for gaining followers the wrong way.  Any tips, strategies or advice is very much appreciated.

Thank you!

[TheeDigital]

AirnWater,

I doubt you will be penalized.  You have to remember that the majority of Facebook is still closed off to Google and it's Spiders, so how would it be able to penalize your fanpage?  Facebook is still far away from ever letting Google completely crawl it, so it won't be able to see your individual posts.

To answer your other question about the contest overall, I would ask what is your mission statement for the contest and what are you doing?  If a client simply asked you to gain fans to their Facebook page, I see no problem in doing this, but if you're trying to drive sales this is completely different.  I will like a Soap page for free soap, but that doesn't mean that their content will be attractive to me.  I simply wanted the free soap.  You have me for free soap and not for the engagement, you have to be careful here now because fans might expect free things from you all the time.

If you still want to continue a contest to increase your fan count though, I don't see why you couldn't hold one every two months.  That's enough time to increase your fan count, while not being a complete saleout.

To get engagement, your money might be better suited elsewhere, in this case(maybe PPC).  I would also work on more fill in the blank posts on Facebook or like posts, to increase edgerank.

[airnwater]

Thanks for your response.  We actually are using woobox to host our contests and are very careful to follow each sites rules about contests, so that isn't an issue for us - my question has more to do with the strategy of gaining followers.  Do you have any thoughts on the other questions I listed?

• Is there a reason we shouldn't continue to run these contest to increase fans and interaction?
• How likely is it that Google will penalize us in the future for gaining followers through contests (instead of "organic" followers that followed us without an incentive)?  There are some fans/followers that are serial contest entrants and are always entering a contest - could having too many of these fans raise a red flag for Google and the other search engines?
• How often is too often to be running a social media contest?

[Mark_Jay_Apsey_Jr.]

Contests can and should be a  big part of your social media strategy....especially if it is working well....

There are a few things you want to make sure you are aware of..... For example with facebook you arent allowed to notify winners of your contest through Facebook. You also arent allowed to use Facebook features as a voting mechanism.  And you arent suppose to use liking or commenting on a post or uploading a photo to your Timeline as a entry to a contest.  To read the full list of rules and regulations on facebook, see the details here....  http://www.facebook.com/page_guidelines.php

Twitter rules are a little less restrictive. Here they are.....  https://support.twitter.com/articles/18311-the-twitter-rules.

Pinterest has nor rules...   but they do have an etiquette guide. here it is.... http://pinterest.com/about/etiquette/

What we do to get around some of facebooks rules and to provide an easy way to handle and track the contest is use third party apps.  We use woobox and shortstack.......

Hope this helps.

Mark