Fourteenth of February again? My how quickly it arrives. It’s a golden opportunity to have some fun with an online brand community and these are four of my favourite competitions for creating a ripple into the social networks of your fans.

1. Get people to write a poem

In 2011 I came up with a How Red Are Your Roses? poetry challenge that had the Yuppiechef Facebook community composing rhyming poems to their favourite kitchen tools for a chance to win the tool of their affection.

The twist with this was that they stood to win the tool they wrote about so it paid to be bold! We realised a lot of people were writing about the KitchenAid Artisan Stand Mixer and even though it wasn’t planned to give such a big prize away, we went for it and made someone’s day.

TIP: Get people to do something that requires some thinking and creativity, your brand stays on their radar longer. We got people to write Haikus once, too.

2. Snap a Valentine-photo & win

In 2013 we asked people to snap their foodie Valentine to win. The aim of this was to encourage photo sharing – always a win from a reach perspective if you can get people to actually do it.

The uptake wasn’t as good as the poetry mechanic but we did get some nice entries and for the smaller number of entrants it reached it was a rich engagement.

TIP: Be careful how you set this up so that if no one enters you aren’t left with egg on your face. For example, be vague about the number of winners you’ll pick.

3. Add a caption to a fun image

Folks love to come up with a caption! it never ceases to amaze me. In 2012 we got people to caption a little exchange between an egg and a whisk and our Quirky Captions Contest was born.

We built a special page where people could type into a field and text appeared in the speech bubble (fancy). Here are the 10 winners.

Just this morning, I repeated this mechanic and asked Yuppiechef Facebook fans to add a crumbly pick up line to a little picture of a romantic biscuit. The engagement has been solid so far and I extended it onto twitter so there is some nice activity going down.

TIP: Don’t go too specific. In retrospect I realise it might have been a bit limiting to make it about biscuits but the engagement has been really good anyway.

4. Tag-and-win

Ever been tagged in a Facebook post? I would find it supremely annoying unless it was so that I could win something awesome and the person tagging me was doing so at least semi-unselfishly.

We went with a tag-and-win mechanic for a League of Beers Valentine’s giveaway this year and it went down super well. 

TIP: Make sure it is clear how and when you are going to announce the winners on the original post or people will spam you for days.

Got a competition mechanic you’ve tried that has flown on Facebook? I’d love to hear about it.