There is nothing like throwing a competition where it's men vs women and brawn vs beauty. Add in an element of survival of the fittest and appealing to people's good looks and you have a recipe for success.
At least that was what the recent Men's Health and Women's Health Magazines contest set out to prove. In the summer of 2011, they threw an online contest that asked the question:
Do you have America's best body?
If you thought you did, then you were able to enter the Men's Health and Women's Health Fittest Friends on Facebook contest to score a grand prize package worth over $3000 dollars along with the honor of being a workout model for the magazine. Who wouldn't want to pose in a fitness magazine for being crowned the fittest Facebook friend and win a trip to Mexico too?
The trick is trying to stand out from the crowd, is to make your promotion go even further while getting more visibility and positive engagement for your brand. How do you do that? Bring in one of the largest social networks in the world, where there is already a natural competition between people who want to amass the most friends, page likes and updates in the news feed.
Their philosophy was a smart one:
- Hold the competition on Facebook and branded microsites to deliver true multi-channel engagement
- Make it easy for people to enter by submitting their most flattering photo on Facebook
- Ensure there was a valuable and appealing prize involved that appealed to many
- Get entrants to pit their friends against each other for the glory and the honour.
The contest's aim was to strike up some healthy battles and drive user engagement both on Facebook and on the magazines' brand sites. Here's what worked for Men's Health and Women's Health magazines that you can learn from:
Let The Battle Begin
They conducted a contest to find the fittest people on Facebook and utilized the Strutta platform to create a unique entry presentation and voting model. People could enter the competition by submitting their entry through Strutta Facebook app on the Men's Health and Women's Health Facebook pages, then in order to win they had to drive their friends to vote for them by liking the page, voting from the app and sharing to their social networks. The contest also allowed voting on the two magazines branded microsites all integrated through the Strutta API.
Stage the Fight On All Fronts
The beauty of this contest is that it was not just limited to online. They actively promoted across their print magazines to drive people to the Facebook page and create more buzz. They also used their unique brand sites and other social media channels to drive a high degree of consumer engagement for their Men's and Women's Health Magazines - so there were multiple benefits.
And The Winner Is
Everybody it seems. Those who entered got to show off their fantastic physiques, use all those friends on Facebook to boost their ego while garnering enough votes to send them potentially to Mexico and to pose in the pages of the magazine. Men's Health and Women's Health magazines received a ton of attention, new leads and magazine buyers. More importantly the contest generated more than 10 million entry views and nearly 1 million votes. It also generated high levels of social activity: one participant alone generated more than 2,000 click-throughs to the contest via Strutta's integrated social sharing tools.
The Key To Surviving
For brands wanting to fully utilize the best features of the Facebook platform, applications like Strutta that allow you to run competitions that directly engage your community in an interactive way, are proving to be a smart way to do that. In addition the ability to use the features of this app in particular, to build micro-branded sites from which to expand your reach beyond Facebook, and drive cross-traffic is an added bonus. From there it's only your imagination and marketing budget holding you back from creating a winning campaign.