Big Prize Giveaways Focuses on Facebook Promotions

Big Prize Giveaways works with Fortune 5,000 companies to help them implement sweepstakes and other promotions on Facebook with the support of advertising on the site. Founded in 2009 by Jeff French and Dikran Yacoubian, the company found its way to promotions after dabbling in other areas of platform development. We spoke to French as part of our ongoing series of Page management profiles, which most recently included Vitrue and Wildfire. Here some more details. Inside Facebook: What products and services does your company provide to clients using Facebook? What types of clients are you aiming to reach? Jeff French: We help clients build engaging and viral promotions for the Facebook Platform and we seed those promotions by sharing with our 2.8 million fans on Facebook. We then manage Facebook ad buys for the promotion to target the clients’ desired audience and drive maximum response. We basically do everything related to a promotion: Provide all technology, design all of the creative assets, handle the rules, prizes, bonding, Facebook approvals, media buying, etc. It really is a complete turnkey solution. I'd say that about half of our clients come to us with a specific idea and we build a promotion around their concept. The other half come to us with literally nothing. We spend some time understanding what they do and their overall media goals. From there, we try to figure out how Facebook fits into the equation and then we develop a promotion that fits at a strategic level. Obviously some clients want promotions that just drive fans but many (especially our larger Fortune 500 clients) are more concerned with how the promotion fits into their broader multi-channel strategy. Things like earned media, like viral sharing are very important to these clients so we try to develop around these goals. We specialize in enterprise solutions for Fortune 5,000 clients but we also have various solutions for small-midsize businesses to promote sweepstakes on Facebook. IFB: Can you share some highlights of how your company has helped clients meet their goals using Facebook? One promotion we did for General Motors Corporation was meant to maximize brand and earned media impressions, grow the Facebook fan base and educate sweepstakes entrants about the GM College Discount Program. We built a custom sweepstakes with a $500 gift card prize advertised on the Big Prize Page and with Facebook ads. We had 171,719 sweepstakes visitors, 68,583 entries, 8.9 million earned impressions and 81.6 million other impressions. Another example is a campaign we did to promote THQ's release of its Beat City game, which included a Facebook app demo of the game, and also to promote the company's Page. Ultimately we had 48,839 entries, 4.4 million earned impressions, 31,000 game installs and 41,900 new fans. IFB: Overall, can you share metrics on the scope of your business? JF: We have self-funded the project and we are profitable. We maintain a lean team of 12 full-time equivalents in Columbia, South Carolina. We have accepted over 20 million sweepstakes entries on the Facebook platform and we expect this number to more than double in the next 12 months. Our own Facebook Page has over 2.8 million fans that enjoy learning about new promotions when they are launched. This is a great tool to help seed the virality of new promotions and supplement the Facebook ad buys we execute for our clients. IFB: What metrics do you use to determine the success of a given campaign? JF: Some clients are looking for more fans while others are focused on the amount of “earned media,” for example, viral sharing in the Facebook feed. The success of each campaign is honestly driven by the client's objectives and ROI is based on how well we meet their target results. IFB: What have been your biggest challenges building on Facebook platform? What mistakes have you made and learned from there? JF: The Facebook platform is rapidly evolving and just like other application developers we’ve had to manage these changes as our products iterate. We’ve learned to be flexible and our platform is modular — which helps us quickly adapt to new changes. IFB: Beyond your own efforts, what Facebook changes have noticeably helped your company? JF: The Facebook promotion guidelines have placed a premium on our skills. We are highly knowledgeable in administering custom promotions for the Facebook platform and we are able to execute for our clients while allowing them to focus on other aspects of their broader social media strategy. IFB: On the other hand, has Facebook made any recent changes that have noticeably hurt your company? JF: Just like other application developers it took us a while to iterate around the changes to the news feed and the deprecation of notifications. IFB: If you could ask Facebook to make a single change, what would it be? JF: The upcoming change to the pixel width on Pages will force us to move more engaging promotions away from the Page and onto the Facebook canvas. This will inherently create some separation between the client's Facebook Page and their promotion. We wish Facebook would change their mind on this one. IFB: How does your work on Facebook relate to your work on other platforms? JF: We develop promotions exclusively for Facebook or on micro-sites promoted using Facebook. Since the last f8, many things blur the lines between on-Facebook and off-Facebook development. The vast majority of things that previously required a promotion to live inside the Facebook canvas can now be done on an external site. With all of that said, clients are still very slow to adopt the "open graph" concept and we are still tasked primarily with promoting Facebook Pages and Facebook applications. IFB: Do you have any specific plans that you can share? JF: So far we’ve become a market leader at fan acquisition on Facebook but we want to do more for our clients. We also have a Fan Management Platform in closed beta that will help our clients manage their Facebook presence and maximize their long-term ROI from our promotions. In addition, we are constantly building new promotion types into our platform and expanding our capabilities. [Disclosure: Big Prize Giveaways is a sponsor of Inside Facebook]

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Big Prize Giveaways Focuses on Facebook Promotions

Sara Inés Calderón

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Sara Inés Calderón