How To Build Fanbase On Facebook

One of the best ways to attract new fans is by creating more engaging experiences on your Facebook Page. As of the time this guide was written, Facebook has no limitations on the number of friends you can invite to a public profile. That brings us to the first tip related to a contest from within your Facebook Page.
Tip 1: Drive Invites To Your Facebook Page

Facebook currently has no limitation on the number of fans users can invite to a public profile which makes invitations one of the most important components of generating fans. So how on earth do you get users to invite their friends? Contests of course! Contests are probably the single best tool for driving more users to your public profile if you encourage fans to invite their friends. So how do you encourage individuals to invite their friends?

Right now there isn't actually a way of tracking how many friends a user has invited but you can however develop applications which track the relative "friend density" of any given user within a public profile. As users become fans and install an application, you can check to see which of their friends are also fans of the public profile (and have also installed that given public profile application). There is one downside to this component: it takes a bit more investment. Thankfully Wildfire has built a promotional builder tool which helps brands set up promotions.
Tip 2: Create Friend Leaderboards

One of the best ways to encourage invites is by getting friends to participate in the competition. As I mentioned in the previous tip, providing incentives to invite friends is extremely important. Rather than just displaying a leaderboard among all users, displaying a leaderboard among a user's friends helps those users set more realistic competitive goals. If thousands of individuals are competing, the odds are significantly reduced but if the leaderboard is only visible for friends, there is a much greater likelihood that you'll get a user to engage.
Tip 3: Have The Contest Restart Periodically

If you intent to maximize the effect of your content, you should definitely restart it on a regular basis. While you could theoretically restart it over a shorter period of time, most public profiles do not have a level of engagement in which weekly or daily contents makes sense. Conversely, large brands and organizations can possibly get away with a shorter time frame just as Ashton Kutcher did with his race to 1 million Twitter followers (which was subsequently followed by a surge in Facebook fans). Large brands can attract enough buzz to jump start a contest in a short period but most companies should extend things over a month or longer.
Tip 4: Prevent Users From Gaming the Contest

So after a bit of brainstorming you've come up with the perfect contest idea. Now all you need to do is get it programmed, right? Not necessarily. While simple contests will not be gamed, there are many more robust contest concepts, and I've had a few, which I've realized can be gamed. It's a basic concept but it's extremely important. I can't tell you how many conversations I've seen surrounding questions about the legitimacy of a contest. Often times such questions will even arise during legitimate contests so make sure your contest is air tight.
Tip 5: Provide Cash Prizes

Want to get somebody's attention? Offer them cash prizes or something worth some serious pocket change. Interestingly enough though, this doesn't always work but it most definitely will incentivize a lot of people. Will it serve as a valuable incentive to your target market? Maybe or maybe not but that's up for you to determine when developing the contest. If your reader base is only interested in receiving a free Rolex, you may want to skip over the idea of cash prizes since you could very well break the bank (then again if you're targeting the luxury market, you probably have a fairly sizable marketing budget as well).
Daily Task

Come up with at least 5 contest ideas that you could run on your Facebook Page. Run the ideas by your peers to see which they would be most likely to participate in. At some point over the next 30 days get your contest up and running!

Note
While it's unconfirmed, I've received a rumor that Facebook doesn't want cash giveaways from the news feed due to legal issues. As such, they are encouraging page admins to perform any giveaways via third-party applications, such as the Wildfire application I previously mentioned. I'll update the post if I hear more information.