Not that I know of. I think they implemented filtered messages partly for this reason. Are you selling the product for cheaper? If you're selling it cheaper, you should try and friend the accounts that you're targeting and let them know because it's a legitimate reason to contact them and you probably won't get reported for spam.
No, it's alright. It's better to be skeptical and then rightly convinced than to not be skeptical and then deceived. Along with that, there was an objection brought up about the legality of such a method, and when somebody says that something that might be illegal it's better to take the claim seriously than to brush it off.
thanks for sharing.. such wonderfull info (Y).. cheersIntroduction:
Hi BlackHatWorld! I posted the bare-bones of this as a comment earlier today and it looks like it helped a couple people, so I figured I'd make this guide and elaborate a little bit more. Full disclosure: keep in mind that I haven't actually done anything in the giveaway niche, but I'm confident that I can explain exactly how the methodology differentiates from that of a normal content locker. I'll also go over basic targeting.
Optimizing Your Giveaway Account:
The account that you post on is one of the most important elements of posting giveaways, next to the actual post. People who read your giveaway post and then go to look at your page will not believe the giveaway is real unless your page looks completely legitimate. A bad page will completely kill your virality because nobody wants to share a post on a page that doesn't have any information, or that contradicts itself. You want your page to be air-tight and believable, just like a genuine page would be
There are multiple ways to do this. If you're using a page that already has a following to post a giveaway post, you don't need to worry because your followers liked you for your previous content and will likely assume that your giveaway is also legitimate. They will never know that it's survey-bait because many will do the survey and assume that they've been entered into the giveaway. They'll never know otherwise because rather than assuming the giveaway never existed in the first place, they'll just assume they didn't win.
If you're creating a fresh page to host your giveaway post, make sure you do it right. You can pretend to be a page dedicated to the niche you're targeting, pretend to be a business related to the niche you're targeting, or create a page exclusively named after what you're giving away. A page dedicated to the car niche would be named something like "Speed Nation" and have previous posts with car memes, videos, and information. A business that sounds like it deals in cars might be named "West Coast Engineering" and have previous posts about cars they've detailed and worked on. A page named after what you're giving away might be "Dodge Challenger - Giveaway". If you're presenting yourself as a business, make sure that you don't specify your location. If you specify your location, people will share your post and enter the giveaway less because they'll assume it's only a local giveaway, and you don't want that.
Targeting Your Post and Specifying Your Giveaway Product:
What are you going to give away? You should look for a product that caters as closely to your target audience as possible, yet one that isn't so narrow that the friends of people who share your giveaway post will have no interest. For instance, you can post a car giveaway on a car page, but if you post a Dodge car giveaway on a Dodge car page, you'll get way more engagement. Don't, however, find a Dodge car made in 2001 and try to target "people who like Dodge cars made in 2001" because that's way too narrow. You can post a "Free phone" giveaway on a "technology" page, but you'll be way better off if you post a "Free Galaxy S7" giveaway on an "Android" page. Make sure your product is general enough to go viral because having people share your post is useless if only 1% of the population is interested in it. At the same time, make sure it's small enough to have an audience that is laser-targeted so you can achieve best results. It's a fine line, but after practice you'll find it.
Remember not to give away anything unrealistic. For instance, don't give away a Bugatti Veyron ($2,000,000) when you could be giving away a Skyline R34 ($60,000). Most users will realize that it's not in the best interest of a business to give away a $2,000,000 car, and many will be less inclined to share and enter the giveaway because of this. In the same fashion don't give away a house because it seems unrealistic, but instead give away a boat or something cheaper.
In the same way that your product needs to be catered toward a targeted audience, the giveaway post itself also needs to be catered toward a targeted audience. This means that you can't be giving away cars on a bakery page or phones on a gym page. This is absolutely essential. Instead, give away cars on pages that people who like vehicles follow and give away phones on pages that people who like technology follow. Your locker will not work if you don't target your locker to your audience. If you're not targeting, no matter how much traffic you throw at your page you'll make pennies on the dollar, if that.
Note that I'm using phones and cars frequently as an example in this guide.I can imagine that those niche's are somewhat saturated and you will probably not have success with them. They are just example niche's. You'll get farther in giveaways if you have a unique niche that you can promote to with high engagement. Keep in mind that you can apply giveaways to many other things, you just have to make sure you're following the same general principles. Maybe you want to give away a custom-built computer to a page full of PC gamers. Maybe you want to give away hundreds of dollars of makeup to a page full of women. Maybe you want to give away a free scholarship to a bunch of college students. Find something that works and stick with it.
General Tips on Writing Your Post:
When writing, make sure that your post is free of spelling and grammatical errors. If you don't speak English natively, get a friend or co-worker to read it over. This is important because nobody who owns a popular page or official business that interacts with a mainly English population is going to mess up their spelling or grammar. If there are errors in your spelling or grammar, there is less of a chance that people who see your giveaway will share or enter it.
Also, don't give anything away without a reason. Remember that people are more inclined to view giveaways as legitimate if they are in celebration of some conquest or milestone. Act like it's in your page's best interest to give back. It would look (somewhat) shady if a page that claimed to be a business randomly decided to give away something worth thousands of dollars, so make sure you make up a reason. You can give away free iPhones because you've "ordered too much and are overstocked". You can give away cars because you've "just sold your 1,000th car". Brainstorm a little bit.
Remember to use "we" instead of "I". Do this because it will unknowingly implicate to the reader that an organization of people are operating your giveaway, rather than just one person. More people, in turn, add more credibility to the page and ultimately the giveaway. This is especially important if you're running a giveaway on a page named after exactly what you're giving away (See "Dodge Charger - Giveaway" above), because you want it to seem like the implication is that some brand or website is operating the giveaway. You could even *cough* *cough* pretend to be the brand *cough* *cough*.
Writing the Giveaway Post Itself:
Remember that he point of a giveaway is to get it to go viral. Unlike content lockers for other things, the average person will probably think a giveaway is completely legitimate unless told otherwise. Because of the edge that giveaways have over other content locking niche's, you want to really convince people of the legitimacy of your giveaway and get them to share the post with their friends, who will then share it with some of their friends. Remember to tell the user to:
1. Like the page.
3. Like and share the post.
2. Comment what version of the giveaway they want below (e.g. "Comment what color of car you want, "Comment either "iPhone 6S" or "iPhone 6S Plus"").
4. Fill out the "form" in the link (do not mention "surveys" on giveaway pages, because the idea of a "survey" will turn many lazy people off that may have otherwise warmed up to sharing and entering the giveaway.)
EDIT: Make sure that you've made it clear to the user the things above must be completed to be eligible for entry. Otherwise, they'll be under the impression that liking the page, liking the post, and sharing the post are just suggestions. This will lead to less virality.
EDIT: Don't forget to put a date on your giveaway post and make it sometime in the next week. People don't want to enter a giveaway that happens in 30 days, they want to enter a giveaway that happens in 3 days. Additionally, people won't enter giveaways once they're over. Because of this it's important to change the date of the giveaway every week or so, so that it doesn't imply that it already happened.
EDIT: One last thing, remember to remove comments on the post or page that say it's survey-bait, a virus, or a scam at least once every 12 hours. You want to make sure there's no implication that there is anything shady going on.
Let's go through each of those separately. First, the order. It is important that you ask them to like the page, like and share the post, and comment on the post before the user gets to the landing page. This is because many people who see a survey after they've chosen the color of their car or the model of their phone aren't going to like or share the page. You want them to like, comment, share, and then click the link, which is why it must be step number 4. The absolute last thing you want the user to do is find the survey first, because that means that the first thing all their friends they've shared the post with will find is the survey. It's important to deter the user from the actual landing page for as long as possible.
Next, the steps. Asking users to like the page itself will give it somewhat more visibility and legitimacy. Also, the fact that they liked the page may make the post show up on their friend's news feeds, giving even more exposure on top of liking, sharing, and commenting on the post itself. Asking the user to share the post will automatically make it appear to a couple hundred of their friends, while asking them to like and comment on the post will make the posts more visible on their friend's timelines than any other posts they may make. This is because Facebook's news feed algorithms give more priority to a post that has been liked, commented on, and shared as opposed to one that has been merely shared.
Remember that asking the user to "share" the post is specific to giveaway niches. If you're asking a user to share your post in order to get infinite Clash of Clans gems, it's not going to go well. This is because giveaways are seen as more legitimate by the average Facebook user than things like game hacks (infinite Clash of Clans gems) are. If a user is asked to share a post to be entered in a giveaway, they assume it's just positive marketing to get more people to enter their giveaway. However, if you're asking a user to share a post about game hacks before they receive the game hack, they'll realise much more quickly that something's fishy because people will wonder why a post for a game hack needs to be shared with their friends. On the contrary, every user will implicitly assume that the page promoting the giveaway just wants more people to enter it. Thus, there is a warrant for the user to share a giveaway post, while there is no reason the user should share a post about game hacks.
Promotion:
You need to constantly be promoting your giveaway page in relevant groups. It will go viral, but only a limited amount. Your traffic will not just multiply exponentially until you reach all 1,200,000,000 Facebook users. Don't assume that when I say "your post will g viral" that this means everybody will see it. You can also tag friends in statuses (not real friends on your real account, unless you're a jerk) and comment on pages that are relevant to your niche, but both are way less believable and look way more spammy than just sharing your pages post in groups.
I won't go into too much depth on this because group marketing tutorials can be found in many places on BHW (and because this guide is getting a little long). Essentially, target your groups the same way you target your audience or page itself. Are you giving away free iPhones on an Apple page? Find Apple groups and share your post to it. Are you giving away a free Dodge Challenger? Find groups with the keywords "car" or "vehicle" and prioritize groups with the "Dodge" and "car" or "vehicle" keywords for better engagement. Remember to do this from an account that is not the admin of your page. This will result in a lower chance of your page getting banned if Facebook ties the post's of a user that admins a page with the posts of the page itself. Also, add another admin to your page in case you get banned. I can't stress that enough.
What I would do personally is use fake accounts to "share" the giveaway post into different groups, rather than posting the link of the giveaway post in the group. Your group marketing has to be just as attractive and incentivized as the marketing of the page itself. Remember that any account which posts the link in a group may be flagged if the page is ever deleted, so make sure you're not spreading your group shares out around too many accounts. This is a churn-and-burn type niche, because your page will get banned eventually.
Statistics and Virality:
Let's imagine how this would work in practice using ballpark numbers. Imagine you follow the above method and get 200 clicks. If 60 of those people shared your link before they got to the page and 100 people saw each of those 60 posts, that's an extra reach of 6,000. If instead those 60 people liked the page, commented on the post, liked the post, and shared the post there'd be 200 people that see the shared post because of the increased user-to-page engagement, and an extra reach of 12,000! Now, imagine that of the 60 people that shared the previously shared giveaway post, 20 of their friends also shared it. That's another extra reach of 2,000 right there. Then again, if the 20 people that shared that post had 5 friends in total share it, your reach just went up by another 500. That's an extra reach of 13,5000 purely due to virality, and probably a couple hundred clicks.
By asking the user to share, you get exponentially more clicks because the virality of incentivized sharing is high as opposed to non-incentivized sharing, especially if your giveaway is in a niche that appeals to large amount of the demographic on Facebook. By asking them to like and comment, you've boosted the users activity in relation to the Facebook page. This helps because a post that the user has liked, commented on, and shared is a post is more likely to be seen by their friends before their other posts. The same is true for liking the page itself. If 2 posts were the exact same, Facebook's news feed algorithm would always prioritize a post that by a liked page that is liked, commented on, and shared over a post by a non-liked page that is liked, commented on, and shared. This is why it's important to tell your users to like the page itself, as well as the post.
One last thing: don't be discouraged by small sample sizes! Imagine you do an experiment, for instance, on what the most popular favorite color is and only survey 5 people. Because you've only surveyed 5 people, it's entirely plausible that everybody answers "yellow", right? Thus, after surveying 5 people you might think that yellow is the most popular favorite color. However, if you survey 100 people you'll get all sorts of colors in response, and you may find that green is actually the most popular favorite color. It's the same thing with clicks. Get yourself at least 1,000 clicks and then look at your conversion rate before you make judgement about how well you're doing. At the start, you simply don't have enough data. Most importantly, target and get users to like, comment on, and share your posts and you could easily make $20.00 to $30.00 per day with 200 initial clicks and correct virality.
EDIT: White hat method, actually give away the car.
That's it! Comment and let me know if this guide helped you in any way, and if you have any questions, concerns or suggestions!
